However, these and other things did not at the time shake Luther's belief in the Catholic Church. He came to Rome and left Rome a devout Catholic. Staupitz, the vicar of his order, had really gratified him in permitting him to go to Rome as the traveling companion of another monk. Luther had expressed the wish to make a general confession at Rome. With this thought on his mind he started out, and he treated the whole journey as a pilgrimage. After the manner of pious monks the two companions walked one behind the other, reciting prayers and litanies. Whether his general confession and his first mass at Rome, probably at Santa Maria del Popolo, gave him that sense of spiritual satisfaction which he craved, he has not told us. When he had come in sight of the city, he had fallen on his face like the crusaders in sight of Jerusalem, and had fervently blessed that moment. Now he ran through the seven stations of Rome, read masses wherever he could, gathered an abundance of indulgences by going through prescribed forms of worship at many shrines, listened to miracle-tales, knelt before the veil of St. Veronica near the Golden Gate at San Giovanni and before the bronze statue of St. Peter in the chapel of St. Martin, where a crucifix had of its own accord raised itself up and become transfixed in the dome, saw the rope with which Judas hanged himself fastened to the altar of the Apostles Simon and Judas at St. Peter's, the stone in the chapel of St. Petronella on which the penitential tears of Peter had fallen, cutting a groove in it two fingers wide, had the guide show him the Pope's crown, the tiara, which, he thought, cost more money than all the princes of Germany possessed, was perplexed at finding the heads and bodies of Peter and Paul assigned to different places, at the Lateran Church and at San Paolo Fuori, mounted the Scala Santa--Pilate's staircase--on his knees, passed with awe the relief picture in one of the streets which the popular legend declared to be that of the female Pope Johanna and her child, saw the ancient pagan deities of Rome depicted in Santa Maria della Rotonda, the old Pantheon, stared at the head of John the Baptist in San Silvestro in Capite, tried, but failed to read the famous Saturday mass at San Giovanni, the oldest and greatest sanctuary of Christianity, rested from a fatiguing tour through the Lateran in Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, where Pope Sylvester II, the Faustus of the Italians, was carried away by the devils, went through the catacombs with its 6 martyred Popes and 176,000 other martyrs, etc., etc.