“The Little Vatican” at Rome's Catacombs of San Calisto. What I saw at Santa Priscilla, however, was even cooler. Dr. Henry Jones, Jr., would approve.

Indiana Matt and the Catacomb of Doom

Sloth occasionally has its benefits. One grey Sunday morning in December, I’d wandered over to studio in a haze of sleep and plopped down at a computer terminal, trying to decide whether to go over to the 10:30 Tridentine at San Gregorio or wait until the evening when our indefatigable chaplain, Fr. O., would celebrate an English mass at Santa Maria in Monterone, the little Redemptorist church next door. I usually do both on Sundays, taking advantage of Rome’s liturgical variety as well as the pleasant albeit largely unknown canon which allows the faithful to receive the Eucharist twice in one day. However, for whatever reason, I hung back and decided to let morning mass slide.

As if on cue, the next person I saw come into the computer lab was none other than our very own Fr. O. in his clerical suit and matching black sweater vest. He’d not come to upbraid me on my lapse in Catholic nerd enthusiasm, but instead heard up the faithful members of his theology class to head out for our private tour of the Catacombs of Santa Priscilla.

Which I had forgotten completely about.

Fr. O. is one of the finest priests I know, and his seamless mixture of real, get-your-hands-dirty holiness and humor is about the only way to cope with the Eternal City. He’s from the diocese of Kalamazoo.

I sometimes wonder if he’s the only man who works there, in that vast imitation-renaissance Fascist-classical pile nicknamed “Vatican South.” He must have the busiest schedule in the Holy See, and yet he still finds time to sit down and talk with us, give spiritual direction, hear confessions, or simply spend a few minutes sharing some bureaucratic clerical joke. How he ever got chained to a desk in Trastevere’s Palazzo San Calisto is a mystery to all of us, including himself. I’m envious of whatever parish gets him when they finally let him go home.

We waited for stragglers, Fr. O. muttering pepperishly about the Italian bus system. We had an hour until our appointment with the famous—infamous?—Sister Ellen, the Vatican’s directress for the catacombs of Santa Priscilla. And if we missed that, it could be months before we got a shot at seeing the place again. Fr. O. had warned us about Sister. She’s less Indiana Jones than the Flying Nun, with an accent that’s two parts Brooklyn and one part Frau Doktor Professor. She’s also hilarious.

It was, I believe, an hour after we had seen bus 630 speeding into the far distance of a side-street near the Vittoriano that we decided that it was a lost cause. No replacements in sight, and we’d missed our tour. Father shrugged with a half smile, half-frown, and promised us lunch and a real tour in the spring. And that was the last I heard about it until a week before we were due to leave for home.

***

And so, one equally grey rainy afternoon in Spring, we’re standing in the little stuccoed cloister of the Pontifical Commission on Sacred Archaeology at the Benedictine convent of Santa Priscilla in the vague northern hinterland of Rome. It would have once been rolling fields and rich villa gardens, but now it’s a suburban tangle, though you wouldn’t know it by the milky white silence of the courtyard. The dull cloudy light was beautiful on the salmon-pink stucco, vivid green leaves sprouting from a tangle of thorny bushes in the small garden. It’s all soothingly domestic, the benches along the walls, the Roman brick pavement, the white marble fragments set into the walls, startlingly bright in the shadows.

And then there’s Sister Ellen. She greets Fr. O. with easy, energetic familiarity. She’s definitely Brooklyn, all sturdy five-foot-nothing of her. She bashfully says she’s put on her full habit for us; she’s dressed neatly in black, scapular, white-trimmed veil, tunic down to the floor, with a sensible waterproof windbreaker thrown over it. She’s a new recruit to the order, though she’s in her forties; she’s been studying the arcana of the early Church for decades nonetheless. Then she admits she drank a little red wine for lunch—and she doesn’t drink at all very often. “So if we get in trouble for going too deep, just tell them it’s the drunken nun’s fault,” she teases. She certainly seems sober enough to me.

But Father is right; she is a scream, and a sweetie at that. We later decided that if we ever owned a bar, we'd call it The Drunken Nun in her honor.

Soon, we’re down in the tunnels. I’m not sure what to expect, and I’m not sure what I want to expect. The semi-perverse let’s-freak-out-Protestants side of me is hoping for the undercroft of the Castle of Otranto full of lugubrious decay. Another voice is calling on Indiana Jones and still a third bit is wondering if I could get an indulgence out of this communion with the ancient Church. Sister does not, however, look particularly like the Crypt Keeper, so option number one, for better or worse, is probably out.

Or is it?

We descend into the darkness, and the first thing I notice is the smell. Subterranean Rome is full of fascinating odors. The excavations beneath St. Peter’s have a spicy, moldy sort of smell, with a hint of something verging on instant coffee as you pass the Egyptian tomb. Here, however, it’s slightly different. It reminds me of a mixture of mildew and baking bread. Then things start getting interesting.

After all, we were underground. Really. Our flashlights dazzled momentarily on a thin skin of stagnant, clammy water coating the stone-hard, stone-cold earth floor, packed rock-solid by two thousand years of footprints. Slices of faded vermilion fresco on walls pockmarked with light and darkness as we passed. The darkness was palpable, malleable as we moved up and down across uneven, sloping, curvilinear pavements of sculpted dirt, black all around us save for the blacker slits of the loculi inset into the walls, the stacked, empty tomb-chambers that had once stored the bones of saints, martyrs and ordinary sinners like me.

It was like climbing up and down through the stony viscera of a giant: everything, from walls to floor, was warped and curved and organic, funereal Gaudí, full of vermiculated channels like an age-scored face.

We finally came to the first tomb chamber, mellow in the electric light with its faded pale stucco and ancient frescoes. The tomb of the barrel-makers, so-called because of the crude, dashed fresco of two men hoisting an enormous tun on their shoulders in the shallow low apse. Overhead, in a low vault, a webwork of crimson lines compartmentalized a serene assembly of anonymous saints, arms spread out in prayer. Crude, naïve, wonderful.

Sister Ellen was soon dissecting the simple paleo-Christian iconography around us with childlike gusto. She had a stubborn, sharp-featured face, ever-so-slightly weathered, dark brows above dark energetic eyes, darting around the symbol-encrusted walls of the little chamber. On one side, Jonah was vomited out onto a barren shore by an antique dolphin, resurrection and baptism in one figure. Above him—“See the jack in the box?” Sister laughed. It was Noah rising from an ideographic ark, looking for the dove to return. And then there was the Good Shepherd at the center, abstract and delicate as a new watercolor, delicate grayed brushstrokes just enough to suggest perfection.

Some incongruous childish graffiti in a bold Renaissance hand littered one wall, an a five-hundred-year-old date and an artificially classicized Italian name, a man trying to look antiquely hip to his peers. Condensation—our condensation—was beginning to gather in big fat droplets on the fresco. Delicate conditions. We moved on, through the crazy-quilt maze of tunnels. On either side, black holes gaped abutting onto slitted galleries with curving walls, onto chill damp air. Inscriptions in incised, curling Roman cursive, in Greek, broken off by time and accident. A splash of copper-green mold around a mine lamp. An air-shaft going down into Borgesian infinity, pierced with black windows.

As we walked, Sister continued her lecture, pausing by the ominous black cicatrices of the loculi. They were the reason the catacombs were here. The reason we were here. “If you had asked an early Christian,” she said, “where the catacombs were, they wouldn’t know what you were talking about.” Ad catacumbas was a place, a very specific place by the church of San Sebastiano, from a Greek word meaning “hollow.” The term eventually became applied to the vast underground cemeteries that both pagans and Christians had begun to dig as cremation fell out of fashion in ancient Rome under both the influence of Christianity and the mummification rituals of Egypt.

And so the loculi, these shallow sideways graves like bunks on an underground railway, came into existence. They were long empty by now, many of their bones moved to churches in the fifth and sixth centuries for safety and reverence. Around seven thousand bodies lay buried under Santa Bibiana in Rome, moved from here ages earlier. A few were still mysteriously bricked up, others marked with the crude palm-branches that might—just might—mark the grave of a forgotten martyr.

I could see the glitter of pyrite embedded in the walls around us. We were going to see another martyr’s tomb, far grander, but now empty. Sister gathered up her skirts primly, and we disappeared, flashlights in hand, down steep steps into a lower, narrower gallery. Overhead, suddenly, the close vaults vanished and the ceiling rose into irregular nothingness, loculus rising on loculus. Some were even graves within graves, children laid to rest with their parents, crowding close to one arch-niched tomb set high in the wall above us. The martyr’s tomb, now empty.

Palm branches are not always a sure clue of martyrdom: they were, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, enough to prove St. Philomena’s authenticity and raise her to celebrity status among the holy (and become a personal pal of the Curé d’Ars), and yet, not enough, as Christian archaeology evolved, to keep her on the calendar during the changes of the mid-60s. However, here there was more than ambiguous iconography to tell the tale of this sepulcher.

You see, this tomb high overhead—twenty, thirty feet—amid the broken remains of half-excavated, half-empty loculi had once been far closer to the ground. They’d lowered the floor, excavated a vast double-height gallery just to accommodate the Christian dead who had wished to be buried so close to this simple tomb with its white plaster arch and delicate fresco of martyrial palm branches in faded scarlet and green. The very stones were crying out.

It was eerie. It was spectacular. Everything seemed changed, otherworldly. Vera, standing next to me in her mundane grey hooded sweatshirt, now seemed to have the face of a Roman Egyptian tomb-portrait with staring Minoan eyes, the very stone around us—already strange and unfamiliar—seeming to come from a whole other universe. It was strange and wonderful, less a dungeon than a subterranean maze on Mars full of extraterrestrial aesthetics one could never even dream.

And there was more, much more. We passed weathered amber-stained bones there, left haphazardly in a burial hole, or a vast Ezekiel-like cache lying in a blackened pile beneath an arch. Just sitting there, the physical residue of twenty people’s earthly lives, within reach, within touching distance without glass or earth or museum-quality plastic to seal them off. We saw a moldering round nymphaeum that might have been the grave of some of the earliest popes. Seven of them lie somewhere within the maze of Santa Priscilla. We saw the oldest Madonna and Child still in existence, from the year 220 AD, delicate as a Renoir pastel.

“How’s that! Hah!” cried Sister triumphantly.

We saw another martyr’s tomb—occupied—protected by a modern metal grate against intruders. We went down and down and down, we saw small knots of anonymous bones caught momentarily in the yellow gleam of the flashlight. We peaked into half-open loculi and saw a shard of skull lying in the gritty dirt. Fr. O. paused. “This was somebody’s wife or cousin or sister. This was somebody’s Aunt Mabel. They wanted to stay close to them. They were their ancestors; and they’re our ancestors, too.”

He smiled, and then a little farther down the tunnel succeeded in scaring the student walking in front of him by grabbing him by the arm. He was quite proud of that. Of course, the student in question was usually pretty unflappable, so it was quite an achievement.

Eventually, we surfaced once again in a broad, low cellar, familiar Roman brickwork rather than gnarled interstellar sculpture. The light was clear and pale on the whitewashed vaults. A square marble altar-top stood on a disused Corinthian capital next to a verdigrissed crucifix. “This might have been the cellar of St. Priscilla’s house,” explained Sister Ellen. “She may have been a Roman widow who helped with the burial of martyrs. Or perhaps she was the Priscilla St. Paul salutes in one of his letters.” Another mystery of the catacombs.

She had one more secret: the Greek Chapel. It stood off one side of the well-lit cellar, small and dark, until she threw a magic switch and we saw a chamber, a delicate little jewel, straight out of Pompeii. The walls were lined with rich painted faux marble, mustard-yellow and crimson, with mellow shadow-colored silhouettes above showing stories from the Old Testament. Moses and Aaron, the wrongly-accused Susanna defending her innocence like so many Christians accused of atheism and cannibalism as pagan after pagan in high places perverted their true beliefs out of ignorance.

It was a perfect little church; and while the catacombs were seldom used for public mass before the fifth century, above one red-stuccoed arch was the first image of the Mass we still have extant. It’s highly stylized, looking more like a fashionable image of a supper than a sacrifice—but it isn’t meant to be literal, for the faded figures gathered around the table have before them in addition to the Body and Blood, a basket of fish recalling the feeding of the five thousand in addition to the slaughtered Lamb of the Last Supper. Ichythys, Jesus Christ Son of God, Savior, the Big Fish among the little fish, the Christians moving unnoticed in a Roman lake. A curious image, a secret, esoteric image that, like the luminous Christ-Helios of the Vatican might have been a deliberately secretive pun that suggested rather than represented.

As we consider these underground chapels, with their shape—faintly basilican even in these early times, we see not a mere symbolic banquet but the familiar shape of the faithful standing with the priest before them, standing like the Jews at the Passover, like the Jews in the Synagogue, like the Jews in their temple, with gutters running red with atoning blood.

At St. Peter’s, the ancient trophy erected over the apostle’s grave in the second century was used as an altar, the same basic shape one could have seen in any church from Nicaea to 1970. Priest and people together faced liturgical east, and like that coded fresco, it too was a secret sacrifice. The altar—facing a wall and a funereal niche—stood six feet off the ground, and only could be reached with a temporary wooden footpace that could be pulled away in the event of a raid by pagan authorities, and the visible reality of Cavalry would melt back unnoticed into the heathen graves all around it.

There was one more thing. A group photo. Fr. O. snapped it, and we blinked our eyes into the blinding white light. “You all look like you’re on the moon,” he teased, looking at the digital display and the pale stony background all around us.

He wasn’t too far off. We’d gone to the moon, to Mars, to Venus, to Dante’s Purgatory and back today. There was a dash of mortuary piety, a dash of the gruesome and the bizarre, a dash of Indiana Jones and gothick romance, but it was too weird and wonderful to be weighted down with fear. And yet it was more than weird and wonderful—it was almost familiar, as if you had sailed to Mars and discovered some crop of childhood secrets entombed beneath the surface. We were among our ancestors, our Christian forebears, whose bones should be venerated rather than reduced to ghoulish Halloween props. And not just venerated, but loved, really loved like the closest of relatives.

We’d gone to the moon and discovered our family—God, Jesus, Mary, Joseph, saints and martyrs and maybe even perky discredited Philomena—were waiting for us there. Maybe that’s what Heaven’s like. Though I’ll pass on the green mold.