A Seacoast in Bohemia

Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, iii.3

I’m about as Slavic as the Dominican archaeologist Fr. Mullooly, but when I heard that the good Irish priests of San Clemente and the Colegio Nepomuceno, the old Bohemian Seminary, would be combining forces to celebrate the feast of St. Cyril and St. Methodius in the grand Roman manner, I suddenly felt in the mood to get in touch with my inner Czech.

Anyway, they were having refreshments afterwards. It beat having to join the dateless-and-depressed clique of arkies mooning about the studio that evening. Nobody else I could get hold of was interested in having an evening out with the Lord Cardinal Spidlik, S.J., however. Really, that’s what it said on the program, Signore Cardinale. More reason to like the old feller.

But I suppose the 95-year-old author of Fasting is the Prayer of the Body does not strike the average young adult as a party animal.

The feast of St. Cyril is the object of one of my little jokes. I’ve given up on Valentine’s Day myself; the martyr of Terni disappeared into the collective unconscious ages ago. I figure that all those eastern nationalities need their own ethnic holiday. Everybody’s a Slav on St. Cyril’s Day. All those pink roses, well, you could give them to your favorite Polish girl. We could serve vodka with red food dye in them and wear “Kiss Me, I’m Croatian” buttons (with inscriptions, naturally, in Old Church Slavonic).

Hm. Maybe not Croatian, that doesn’t sound right. Ukraine. Yes, Ukraine girls are much cuter. Ahem. Well, those Ukraine girls really knock me out / They leave the West behind / And Moscow girls make me sing and shout / That Georgia's always on my mind, mind, mind. Thus McCartney and Lennon. Look, you knew that was coming, right?

Rome’s full of these high-energy, high-liturgy parish festivals. Only last week I’d dropped by Santa Maria in Aquiro for Cardinal Innocenti’s celebration of Our Lady of Lourdes. The parish has the historic first image of the apparition to be venerated in Rome, and venerate it they did, with incense and a flock of white-surpliced assistants surrounding the Cardinal with a highly pre-Conciliar cloth-of-gold mitre flashing above his face. The thing had to be at least three times as big as his head. Great stuff.

Spidlik may be the only non-episcopal member of the Sacred College, but San Clemente rose to the challenge. Anyway, he still got to wear a mitre, a tasteful white-and-gold Norman affair. It suits him, I think.

I was slightly late, as usual, and found myself slipping in through the side-door of the ancient basilica. Wall-to-wall Slavs, old, young and medium. It was amazing, jaw-droppingly amazing. Incense shrouded the lofty sanctuary beyond the elaborately-marbled cosmatesque choir enclosure.

It also meant I would have to stand for an hour if I couldn’t snag a pew.

There were a few unclaimed benches in the choir, and plenty of laymen for camouflage. Next thing I knew, I was sitting directly beneath the ambo, surrounded by some impressively black-robed monks (Minims, I think), some bearded Slavic professor-types in overcoats and ties, and a flock of church ladies, some still beakily magnificent and others puffily red-eyed. Nuns with florid age-scored faces. And a very odd looking old gentleman with enormous and faintly entomological sunglasses and a Pace rainbow flag knotted around his neck like a scarf. I think he was slightly cracked, as he started gesticulating crankily at the fact I’d crossed one leg over my knee. Maybe a bit too casual for being in the presence of a cardinal, come to think of it.

The scene—oddball interlopers aside—was spectacular. The cardinal, in all his wizened, smiling glory, moved towards the great cathedra high in the apse beneath faded Byzantine apostles with faces like Romano-Egyptian tomb portraits standing beneath paradisical palm trees. The porphyry columns of the baldacchino were shrouded with incense, the chancel lined with ranks of white-robed clerics and surpliced clerks in immaculate surplices. The brown hoods and white capuces of Franciscans and Dominicans peeped above the necks of scarlet-orphreyed chausibles.

And then there were more exotic hints of the Oriental world that St. Cyril had brought into the fold of the Church among the dozens of concelebrants gathered beneath the whirling green mosaic tendrils of the great apse. I could glimpse long, Aramaic hair and wild mandrake beards, exotic and unfamiliar embroideries flashing gold and white, black robes and gold-encrusted stoles.

And up in the apse, standing at the Cardinal’s right hand was an Eastern hierarch, glittering with all the glory of heaven. His sakkos and broad pallium were richly brocaded, half-baroque and half-Chinese, gold and silver and sparkling stones. The gems and enameled saints of his domed mitre threw off dazzling sparks with every turn of his head. He looked like a mobile Fabrege easter egg or Tsar Nicholas II dressed as a disco ball. Or Christ the Great Archpriest, crowned like a king.

It was all fluttering and Byzantine, grave and glorious, rather than lacily baroque like Cardinal Innocenti’s mass had been, and wholly apropos to revivifying the memories of the eastern saint we had come to do our homage to at the court of heaven.

Soon, the Gospel came, the schola of the Bohemian College singing a deep-voiced and intricate hymn in Czech attributed to St. Cyril himself as the deacon and two taperers and a thurifer mounted the great marble ambo, light sparkling on his gold-spattered dalmatic. The censer seemed to resonate, ringing almost harmonically as metal clanked on metal and great clouds of smoke canopied the tribune. The candlelight flickered pinkly on the gleaming foreheads of the black-surpliced clerks crowding the ambo steps.

Spidlik gave the homily from the altar, lapsing into sharp-edged Czech about midway through, to the tittering of a couple of the Slav professors behind me. It’s strange to think it now, this convergence of history and grace in this little church, a successor to the apostles standing and preaching above the tomb of another successor to the apostles, St. Clement, whose proclamation of the Gospel—the Gospel we’d just heard—had landed him in the salt mines of the Crimea and earned him a watery grave in the murky depths of the Black Sea. And whose body had been brought back to his see of holy Rome by St. Cyril himself, buried beneath us, far beneath us, in the vaulted darkness of the crypt. Overhead, the old pope watched us wielding his fluked anchor with St. Lawrence with his exotic scarlet slippers warming themselves on a burning grid-iron ottoman and those even more ancient witnesses Peter and Paul, labeled in cosmopolitan Greek-Latin as Agios Petros and Agios Pavlos.

The Colegio Nepomuceno, the Nepomucenum, is named after St. John of Nepomunk, the Bohemian priest who defended the seal of the confessional with his life. He was thrown off a bridge, they say, for refusing to tell the King the confession of his Queen, and in art he is shown with a padlock through his lips. Death by water was all around us with its baptismal gleam, the anchor of San Clemente on the pilot-house-like baldacchino standing above me.

(Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, / Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell / And the profit and loss. / A current under sea / Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell / He passed the stages of his age and youth / Entering the whirlpool. / Gentile or Jew / O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, / Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you. Thus Eliot.)

I’d been here before. With another inheritor of apostolic grace, the genial Australian Cardinal Pell, the ex-rugby player saying mass above the foundations of a Mithraic temple, a temple for gladiators. He and Spidlik had been given the red hat at the same consistory. Now a Slavic cardinal was venerating the grave of his spiritual forefather, who in turn had venerated a pope who had preached the faith to the shedding of his scarlet blood, just like the oath that Spidlik had taken before the Holy Father himself.

We were together, in a vast hagiographic time warp. Like the sacred anachronism of the Mass, intersecting Bethlehem, Calvary and Easter Sunday all at once, watching St. Clement be hurled from that dread boat into the chill and deadly waters, watching St. Cyril resurrect him, watching cautiously from the coast with the Cardinal of a landlocked nation. Bohemia, like in great Shakespearean geographic chimera, had gained a sea coast which drained the Tiber.

The mass ended soon enough, and a procession formed up. Cross, candles, smoking censer and dozens of attendant priests. Dominican rosaries rattled under chausibles as the black-robed Ukrainian cleric fingered his pectoral cross on a no-nonsense steel chain. The disco-ball bishop’s mitre gleamed like a helmet of mirrors, the stiff embroidered lozenge swinging at his hip like a knight’s shield slung for the march. And then we went down into those vaults whose memory had so filled the liturgy, the crypt of the tomb of Cyril.

(The crypt that Fr. Mullooly, incidentally, had found. Go Irish.)

After an incongruous and short interlude passing through the closed-down gift-shop, we began to burrow into the earth, under pale stony arches and past faded frescoes of St. Clement’s legendary tomb beneath the waves. It had stood visible at low tide on the shores of the Crimea and the images showed processions back and forth full of candles, gleaming lamps and mitred pomp, just as we were doing. An amusement to postmodernists, life imitating art—but for us it was simply life as usual, the endless interwoven Celtic-knotwork world of Catholicism where history and reality blurred into one seamless whole.

Rather like heaven, I suppose.

Soon, we were clustered before the tomb, priests and clerks crowding in concentric ranks on the cardinal and the bishop as the cold blue electric light gleamed on vestments and bald pates. Around them, studding the flinty walls, hung commemorative tablets wild with foreign calligraphy, stone-cut Cyrillic and Roman Romanian, verdigrissed copper reliefs of St. Cyril and his fellow-worker St. Methodius in a monkish hood, massive mosaics and simple burnished bronze. And over the cool white marble slab of the altar, a portrait of the saint himself with age-bitten cheeks, with beard and high-domed head, and the most extraordinary eyes, searing and fierce and strangely serene all at once, like Byzantine Pantocrators were meant to be but never were. They read a chapter from the life of St. Cyril, full of praise and pious death, and after a hymn in melodious Czech—seemingly sung from memory—the cardinal and the bishop dismissed us with pontifical blessings, one Latin and simple, the other a complex and Byzantine two-handed gesture, magnificent and martial and ancient as Cyril himself.

And then we made our way up to the atrium, the old colonnaded atrium that stands beneath the church’s baroque façade and seems as welcoming and antique as the cloister of a California mission. The Colegio Nepomuceno was in charge of the spiritual banquet, but it had also been in charge of more physical sustenance afterwards. I’d been told that there’d be refreshments, but this was an understatement. Slavs of all ages crowded around four immense tables set up beneath the darkened arcades filled with vast spreads of breaded chicken, sweets, three or four oriental subspecies of poundcake, pastry-wrapped shards of sausage, wine, water (fizzante, bah!) and orange juice, apples and oranges. I slipped a Bohemian banana into my coat-pocket and got down to business.

I thought for a while I was the only American there. Everywhere were Easterners of all sizes and shapes: old and weathered; young and beautiful—including a mysterious olive-skinned young woman lurking melancholically amid the pillars (kiss me, I’m Slovak?)—clerical, lay, monastic. I fell in with a bilingual Czech in a cassock, a deacon who I’d recognized from San Gregorio’s Latin Masses, and traded precisely-worded comments back and forth until I ran out of food and energy. I excused myself and suddenly blundered into a North American College lector and his Ukranian seminarian buddy cheerfully sampling the wine.

It was wonderful, the fun only increased by the arrival of a Philippine student in training with the Minims—those impressive black-cloaked monks I’d seen earlier. All black, from hood to scapular even down to their cinctures. We bounced conversation off each other for hours, eagerly making return visits for more chicken and wine and cake. By the end of the evening, we were eating leftovers from a tray held by a laughing monoglot nun who seemed like an extra off of a Hungarian version of Father Ted. Now, what’s Magyar for Go on, go on, go on. Oh go on. More sandwiches?

Well, it’s a sin to waste food, my father always said.

Seriously, it was one of those great Catholic moments where the vastness and the smallness of the world collapse in on each other like a black hole and you trade jokes about Cardinal Ratzinger and Bishop Spong and Hans Küng at the pearly gates and everybody gets the punchline. Or you get fascinating stories about far-away hijinks on church-renovation scaffolds. Or you discover that you have a friend in common—albeit one that your new acquaintence met, not in Rome or Indiana but Lviv in the Ukraine, not far from the churning waters of St. Clement’s death.

Meanwhile, Spidlik sat in the corner under his red skullcap, cheerfully holding court.

I was expecting to be back by seven-thirty at the latest, but the time we parted ways as the last bits of pastry were devoured and the cobbled courtyard began to clear, it was almost ten o’clock.

I think I could get used to being Czech in Rome, at this sacred feast on the windblown Bohemian seacoast.