CATENE DI S. PIETRO. – Those preserved in Rome in the basilica of S. Pietro in Vincoli as relics of the Apostle’s imprisonment. The church was completely rebuilt by Sixtus III (432–40), and from that time it preserved and venerated these relics. Indeed, already in the first half of the 5th century, Bishop Achilleus of Spoleto dedicated a church in which, as he says, just as in that of Rome, “Peter and his chains reign.” Moreover, in an apse of the Roman church there was a distich written in mosaic, which seems primitive: inlaesus olim servant haec tecta catenas vincula sacrata Petri ferrum pretiosus auro.
That the feast of the chains of S. Pietro was always celebrated together with the dedication of the church seems to indicate that the repositio of those relics originally took place at the very foundation of this basilica. In any case, as early as the beginning of the 6th century the church appears under the name ad vincula S. Petri in the most diverse documents; martyrologies and sacramentaries dating from that century report, under 1 August, that on that day the chains were shown to the people for kissing. In 519 Justinian requested from Pope Hormisdas a particle de catenis sanctorum Apostolorum, and thereafter such requests multiplied. It was especially Gregory the Great who contributed greatly to spreading the cult of the chains, distributing many relics of them.
The c. of s. P. now consist of two pieces, in the form of elongated rings of similar workmanship, which seem to have belonged to a single c.: at one end it clasped the neck with a broad ring, and at the other it bound the hands. Various small imitations are available commercially, worn on the person and indulgenced. The ancient sources often speak of a single c.; for example, the Chronographia of Sigebert of Gembloux, where it recounts the celebrated miracle of the healing
of a possessed count in the presence of Emperor Ottone I in 969, through contact with the sacred chain (PL 160, 191).
The tradition of two chains of S. P., one in Rome and the other preserved in Jerusalem, later brought to Rome by Eudossia, daughter of Theodosius II, and said to have spontaneously joined the Roman one, began to appear only in the eighth century.