From A Window On Monte Mario (IV)

Christian Rome, -- The most enduring Rome of all, -- can be sensed in the skyline of the four great basilicas, in the dank subterranean passages of the catacombs of St. Callixtus and Sebastian. It is everywhere -- the uniqueness of Vatican City, the world’s tiniest State (109 acres); the hour spent thinking about Michaelangelo’s “Genesis” (on the ceiling) and his “Last Judgement” (rising back of the altar) in the Sistine Chapel; and the “School of Athens” which Raphael purposely left unfinished to remind us that the human mind is not enough without God’s revelation.

Even the Coliseum was “baptized” by Benedict XIV who built a Via Crucis in it to exercise the blood of the martyrs. Our own American continent gave gold for the ceiling of Santa Maria Maggiore in 1500. And our nation gave the Paulist priests who staff the venerable Church of San Susanna. Here, it’s just as if a Catholic were back in the States -- confessions everyday, pamphlets and a good library, an able women’s guild, and a smiling portrait of Cardinal Cushing.

Pope Leo XIII, the first pope really to take note of the growing Catholicism in the United States, is commemorated in St. John Lateran. Appropriately, a sculptured workman stands nearby to recall his “Rerum Novarum” on labor and capital.

An Earlier Council

Because we are here, not as tourists but as Council Fathers, there is one place that intrigued me most. In the Lateran there is as an echo of another Council, the Fourth Lateran in the early 13th century. It was invoked by one of the most brilliant men of the Middle Ages, Innocent III, who is buried here.

By that time, the Papacy had earned the awesome respect of Christendom. Because Christianity had filled the vacuum of law and order during the dark ages; because it alone stood against the political usurpation of the temporal rulers, and finally because it had pacified, educated, healed and helped most of Europe, Innocent called that Council at what was probably the peak of all Christian power. The results did not deepen, however, the Christian spirit. Another Council, Trent, had to repair its broken parts in the 16th century, and the First Vatican faced a world of anti-papal politics and anti-Christian thought in the 19th.

What a contrast today! Vatican II has boldly met its challenges, given Popes John and Paul a voice even more universal. Ours is not the task of power or condemnation or defense. It is a path of responsibility opening into broad lands of opportunity.

“Art Of Being Happy”

And of the Italians, the Romans? They are, of course, not like Americans. When we gulp a sandwich and go back to work, they rest. While we watch the audience at an opera as much as the stage, the Italians engage almost passionately in the performance itself. They are informal at Mass: I recall one place where a bicycle path cut across a corner of the Church, and a black haired acolyte who “participated” by asking me how I liked the wine, and the people if they needed to go to confession! He also emptied the lavabo-water on the marble floor with a disdainful gesture.

No traveler should generalize -- there are intense and solemn men here like some Italian cardinals; mean and close-fisted men like most of the cabbies; hard-hitting and single-minded nuns who come to every audience to crowd out people who will never see a pope again. You find people like this everywhere.

But, in my opinion, the charm of Italians lies, as the American William Dean Howell wrote, “the great art of being happy.”

“I would rather have the perpetuity of the cameriere’s smile when he came up with our coffee than Donatello’s “San Georgio” if either were purchasable.”

Howell loved their “manners as a whole, their natural ways, bonhommie, the great art of being happy which is here practiced with this added charm, that the good people do not know it is an art, the most difficult of all.” I think of the man with smiling boy and girl who offered to take us to the North American College and then to our hotel. We thought he was a professional, so we roundly abused him when he got gloriously lost. It turned out he was no paid driver at all, just an “amico” who wanted to help the Americani. He refused all payment on our arrival, and only on the children could we press a decent amount for fare as we thanked him and retired very humbly.

Barzini has examined his people very closely, but he comes to a dour conclusion: “The Italian way of life cannot be considered a success except by temporary visitors. It solves no problems. It makes them worse... It wastes the efforts and the sacrifices of the best Italians and makes poverty, tyranny and injustice very hard to defeat.” He knows his people far better than I. But perhaps their familiarity with Christ, his Mother, his Saints and his Popes will help build the spiritual renewal the Church is asking for. If it does, it could slowly change the Italian values and their way of life. It could change us all.

That, after all, is the historic wager the Vatican Council is making today. In the sweep of history, from a window on Monte Mario, it appears with God’s grace to be possible to win.

Paul J. Hallinan

Archbishop of Atlanta