A feast of the unity of the Church and a reminder that the first of the four conditions for an infallible papal utterance is that he should be speaking ex cathedra, from the chair, i.e. in his official capacity as pope. The Anglo-Saxons had a special devotion to St Peter and his successors: one thinks of all those Anglo-Saxon kings making pilgrimages to the tombs of the apostles, or Benet Biscop bringing back treasures from Rome, including John the Cantor, to beautify English church worship. Certainly, in Rome one does get a sense of unbroken tradition, of Romanitas and catholicity, and here and there, in the quiet of Sta Sabina perhaps, or one of the other less-visited basilicas, an intimation of a reality which surpasses all the "smoke and the noise and grandeur of Rome" itself.