St. Gregory Nazianzen

Saturday Night Out on the Town

In theory, you could just about spend a whole day attending different masses in Rome. The mass schedule posted up at studio seems to cover every hour from six in the morning to nine ("twenty-one hundred" in Eurospeak) except for that sleepy stretch from one to five in the afternoon. Italy's long dark tea-time of the soul, as Douglas Adams might have put it. And this list doesn't even including the "fun" masses at the Tridentine indult parishes or any of the Eastern Rite liturgies.

Eastern Rite liturgies, yeah.

Last Saturday was a work day for me, highly uneventful. However, I do have my limits. I'm off the clock by six at the latest unless there's a genuinely good reason. And the other day I felt like whooping it up after a long day of drafting. So naturally, my first thought was to head over to the Pontifical Russian College for evening prayer. Smells and bells. A bit of hunting on a map--the big Rome map hanging on the wall of the foyer, which required standing on a chair for a better look--disclosed that the Russicum was not only half-an-hour's trudge through the cold. On top of that was near the train station, a place I generally don't like being around at night. Or even four in the afternoon if I can help it.

So, anyway, I decided to try closer to home and set out for the Ukranian College chapel of Saints Sergius and Bacchus about five-thirty. I vaguely remembered it being across the street from Santa Maria de Monti, and vaguely remembered that in turn as being somewhere behind the big brick maze of Trajan's Markets, so naturally I decided not to bother with looking up directions.

I soon heard the bells of the Gesu tolling three quarters of the hour. I had fifteen minutes and it was getting dark. After bumbling around on the periphery of the Quirinal hill, stumbling up steep streets and watching, half-despairingly, the floodlit seagulls circle the bronze chariots perched atop the Vittoriano, I finally found myself in the Monti neighborhood. The college faced onto a small cobbled piazza, a group of kids rambunctiously crashing back and forth as they played soccer. On the front facade, two statues of two bishop-saints in klobuk and mandyas stood behind protective kid-proof cages.

The chapel was humble, if speaking of a faded baroque elegance. Tinselly, faintly incongruous Christmas decorations were still in evidence, including two highly distracting fake tannenbaums flanking the iconostasis, an elaborate modern openwork screen hung with simple, full-length icons of Christ and the Virgin, St. Vladimir and St. Nicholas, their faces having the gentle, almost naturalistic openness of folk art.

There was no choir, and the priest was wearing only a stole over his black cassock. He was seated in the back as the tiny congregation of one seminarian and six or seven nuns and laywomen sung verses antiphonally between one another in mesmerising Old Church Slavonic. It was so easy, so natural, and yet so beautiful, the masculine and feminine voices mixing and separating with the unconscious perfection of a professional choir. But they were just like you and me, sitting in the pews of this tiny chapel.

The service continued, the priest getting up from his throne in the little apse to desultorily light the six altar candles with a zippo. Perhaps he'd forgotten the iconostasis was less substantial than usual and everyone could see him. The lights suddenly all came on and the celebrant exited and entered for a quick change of vestments. So, now draped in a golden cloak, he watched as the trading of psalms continued. A laywoman got up to lector, giving the reading in chant, unrehearsed and yet perfect. It was etherial and angelic, rather than masculine and earthy, like the chanting I had heard last month at the Greek College. It was a whole exotic new world, another flavor on the Catholic ice-cream cone. I seem to remember I enjoyed in particular the peculiar thrill of crossing myself backwards.

I'd forgotten about the awful trees in the process. Though the kids outside kept producing a strepitus more appropriate for Holy Week as their soccer ball pounded against the door. Afterwards, the big bearded priest popped out onto the square and began to give them a heavy scolding.

The service was over soon enough, and I lingered just long enough to bid fairwell to the image of St. Vladimir, a long-ago ancestor of mine, meditating on being a stranger in this familiar, if new place, among these hymns that I had never heard yet loved as if they were eternally familiar. Enough generations have passed between myself and Vladdie that I'm about as genetically Slavic as Catherine the Great, but it was still a strange and wonderful feeling, thinking of the ancient ties that brought these disparate souls together to praise God in a foreign tongue. I was a stranger among strangers, an American among Slavs. In Italy.

You can't get more Catholic than that.

And so I stepped out into the chill January night and wandered past Indian curry places, Arab restaurants decorated with Tutankhamun stained glass, and found myself, all of a sudden, at the Trevi Fountain. I'd somehow overlooked it these last four months. So I lingered, momentarily, and then set off on my way again. I decided to stop by the Greek College at the churhc of Sant' Attanasio for the second half of their Vespers, though not before I investigated three bookshops en route.

Sant' Attanasio was just as splendid as I remembered, full of resounding deep voices, light glittering on gold-leaf and tiers of guttering candles. And I don't think they minded me being late. After all, I'd seen at least one choir member leave in mid-service last time I'd visited.

After the service, I had a shot at venerating an ornate ostensory. I discovered, after squinting at the crabbed tiny handwriting on the customary parchment slip inside the capsule, it held a relic of St. Gregory Nazianzen. Cool. You gotta love one of the Holy Hierarchs. Also, I seemed to be getting pretty proficient at the whole backwards sign of the Cross thing. And if that wasn't enough, I discovered Rome's third English bookstore on the way back home.

So, bookstores and Old Slavonic chant. By all means, an excellent night on the town.