just seems strange, if i went to my church and found a big statue of Satan or fallen angels out front with a little cross on top, it would bother me.
in the US we have an obelisk in our capital, pyramid and eye of horus on out money, it has nothing to do with Christian victory over dark belief systems.
The following is from a book written by a non-Catholic Egyptologist. Notice there is no explanation as to why this particular obelisk is the only one in the world that has no (previous) inscriptions on it, and has never been broken.
The Obelisk in the Piazza di San Pietro
The obelisks of the Piazza San Pietro, Piazza dell’ Esuilino, and the Piazza del Quirinale are all uninscribed. Their dates, provenances, and the reasons they were left uninscribed
are not known…Neither Flinders Petrie, nor any other excavator working in the ruins of Heliopolis, has ever found an obelisk, or even a small fragment of an obelisk, that was uninscribed. The sovereigns of ancient Egypt were ever eager to decorate monuments with their own names and with phrases proclaiming their own glory, no matter what the size of the monument. The only undecorated obelisks in Egypt were unfinished ones abandoned in their quarries, and in fact one of these decoration was already in progress. More probably, the uninscribed obelisks were quarried in Egypt by the Roman emperors expressly to be taken to Rome, although it is possible that they were left incomplete because of the untimely death of the pharaoh.
The Obelisk in the Piazza di San Pietro is important chiefly by its surroundings.. It is made of red granite and stands 25.37 meters high. It was erected in the Julian Forum in Alexandria by order of Augustus and remained their until 37 A.D. when the Emperor Caligula ordered the forum demolished and the obelisk transferred to Rome. It was then erected in the Vatican Circus, and there it remained until its removal to the square before the Basilica of St. Peter (1586). Legend has it that in the Vatican Circus innumerable Christians, including St. Peter and that the reason this obelisk was not later overturned as were all the others in Rome was that was looked upon as the witness to the martyrdom of St. Peter.
Pope Sixtus V appointed engineer Domenico Fontana to move the obelisk from the Vatican Circus
April 28, 1586, Fontana and his men attended Mass at 2:AM, and later offered public prayers for the success of this feat.
Dedication ceremonies, Mass, and a procession with the entire papal court went to the obelisk. More prayers were offered and the obelisk was purified, and surmounted with a cross.
Obelisks of the World, by
Labib Habachi, Scribner’s Sons, 1974, page 74-75
(Former Chief Inspector of Antiquities Labib Habachi is an Egyptian archeologist who has published several books on Egyptology, as well as articles in many journals.)
I would like to add here, that on the top of this Christianized pagan symbol, is a cross. Inside this cross, is a relic of the true cross. Here we have a stone monument that stood in the presence of hundreds of the earliest Christian martyrs containing a relic of the true cross.
To accuse us of paganism is an insult to the deaths of the martyrs who refused to pay homage to Roman gods.