Are St. Peter's bones really under St. Peter's Basilica?

By Andrew McGilly, Founder of Bold Pilgrim · Updated 2026-10-08

The Catholic Church holds that St. Peter's tomb lies beneath the high altar of St. Peter's Basilica and that bones found there can reasonably be considered his, but it has never made this a matter of faith. In 1950 Pius XII announced, "The tomb of the Prince of the Apostles has been found," adding that the bones recovered could not be proved to be Peter's. In 1968 Paul VI said the relics had been identified "in a way that we can hold to be convincing." Scholars still debate the bones.

The popes have chosen their words carefully. Pius XII's caution in 1950 concerned bone fragments found beside the tomb. Pope Francis's letter of 2019 recounts that the excavations later led, in 1952, to a funerary niche attached to a red wall and covered with early graffiti, one of them naming Peter in Greek, and that it held the bones now venerated. Paul VI said in his 1968 address that research, verification, discussion and controversy would continue.

The reliquary of nine fragments Paul VI kept in his private chapel is inscribed in Latin as bones "considered to be" those of Blessed Peter; Pope Francis, who showed the relics publicly in 2013 and gave that reliquary to the Ecumenical Patriarch in 2019, wrote that they "can quite reasonably be considered" Peter's. The case is circumstantial: the position of the grave, early graffiti naming Peter, and the fact that Constantine built his basilica on this awkward hillside. In 2021 researchers proposed that the relics had been moved elsewhere in antiquity; they called it conjecture, and a member of the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology rejected it.

Are St. Peter's bones really under St. Peter's Basilica?

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