During the Second Vatican Council, Karol Wojtyla wrote a short poem about St. Peter, whose feast we celebrate today.

Our feet meet the earth in this place;
there are so many walls, so many colonnades,
yet we are not lost.  If we find
meaning and oneness,
it is the floor that guides us.  It joins the spaces
of this great edifice, and joins
the spaces within us,
who walk aware of our weakness and defeat.
Peter, you are the floor, that others
may walk over you (not knowing
where they go).  You guide their steps
so that spaces can be one in their eyes,
and from them thought is born.
You want to serve their feet that pass
as rock serves the hooves of sheep.
The rock is a gigantic temple floor,
the cross a pasture.

Years later, in his book Gift and Mystery, John Paul II revisited the poem, recalling:
When I wrote these words, I was thinking of Peter, and of the whole reality of the ministerial priesthood, and trying to bring out the profound significance of this liturgical prostration. In lying prostrate on the floor in the form of a cross before one's ordination, in accepting in one's own life, like Peter, the cross of Christ, and becoming with the Apostle a floor for our brothers and sisters, one finds the ultimate meaning of all priestly spirituality.

This reflection is especially germane, today. During a rare, short speech yesterday giving thanks for his sixty-five years of priesthood, John Paul's successor, Benedict XVI, offered his own, strikingly similar reflection.

Eucharistomen [refers not only to] the dimension of human gratitude but naturally at the more profound word that is hidden, which appears in the liturgy, in the Scriptures, in the words gratias agens benedixit fregit deditqueEucharistomen points us back to that reality of thanksgiving, to that new dimension that Christ gave. He has transformed into thanksgiving, and so into blessing, the Cross, the suffering, all the evil of the world. And thus He has fundamentally transubstantiated life and the world, and has given us, and gives us every day, the Bread of true life, which overcomes the world thanks to the strength of his love. In the end, we also want to be put inside this thanksgiving of the Lord and thus really receive newness of life and help in the transubstantiation of the world, so that it might be a world not of death, but of life, a world in which love has overcome death.

It's almost as though Benedict had Wojtyla's Marble Floor fresh to hand. He certainly had Pope Francis's ministry in mind, whose "goodness" he praised as providing more interior transformation "than the Vatican Gardens with their beauty."

"Your goodness," he said to the Successor of the Apostle, "is the place where I dwell, and I feel protected."

Andrew M. Haines is the editor and founder of Ethika Politika, and co-founder and chief operating officer at Fiat Insight.