Waiting on the Via Crucis for a Green Light
The Lateran: Part II of II

If you had asked a medieval pilgrim the holiest spot in Christendom, the indisputable Sancta Sanctorum, he would have unshakingly referred you to a chapel, San Lorenzo, that stands at the top of a stairway in Rome called the Scala Santa. Along with the mosaick’d end-piece of Leo III’s dining room that now stands awkwardly grafted onto one side, it is the one remaining fragment of the sprawling Lateran palace that stood there for a thousand years from Constantine to the Babylonian captivity.

In spite of all this, it looks rather like a down-at-heels greenhouse myself in comparison with the great Lateran basilica and the barracks-like bombast of the vast nineteenth-century buildings that replaced the quaint inns of so many Piranesian vedute.

Most Catholics have heard of the Holy Stairs. I thought so, anyway. Or perhaps it’s become one of those sacramental memories that’s fallen into that vague Tridentine time warp that jams everything into one amorphous mess of the Holy Souls in flames and indulgences with years attached. Like St. John Lateran, it lacks the crowds of St. Peter’s, though every day somehow pilgrims find their way here, offering their prayers and sufferings for themselves and their beloved dead. You see them, young and old, beautiful and warty, male and female, backpacked student and burdened adult, climbing slowly up the warped, worn-down wood paneling that covers the ancient marble stairway, polished by hundreds of years of veneration.

You step into the narrow narthex, little more than a peeling Renaissance hallway vaulted over with an intricate and forgettable web of plasterwork and fresco grotesque. An abandoned porter’s bussola stands to one side, dark and dusty, seeming an odd, irreverent and almost despairing addition to the hushed hall, belonging more to the world of holographic Christs and gimcrack Davids that litter the single stall outside in the piazza. But then you move past stoic neoclassical marble images of Christ kissed by Judas, His fork-bearded head down-turned, with a face of subtle sorrow, and Christ in the garden, His eyes full of the agony to come, and look beyond and see the stairs receding into the motey, dusty darkness, the treads crowded with the repeated shape of the back of the dozen, two-dozen penitents that are slowly ascending the stair one step at a time. On their knees.

They are 28 in number, flanked by four other stairways added much later for pilgrims to descend. Legend calls them the steps of Pilate’s Praetorium which Christ ascended to receive His judgment from the lips of a mere mortal, and indeed, at three spots as you slowly climb up their treads, praying or meditating or just thinking, you can see dark blotches beneath the wood preserved beneath glass rondels, and you place your fingers on the dim circular reliquaries and think—are they, are they really spatters of the blood of God? Even the slightest possibility, no matter how tenuous the tradition, sets the mind afire with nameless wonder and sorrow.

Unlike the well-documented relics enshrined at St. Peter’s or down the tree-lined boulevard towards Santa Croce, historians can only date the stairs back to 844, when they were first mentioned in papal documents. Nonetheless, millions have made that devotional journey up the steps, from Martin Luther, who purportedly got up in the middle and walked down with conspicuous impiety, to Pius IX, who made his last journey up the steps on September 19, 1870, only a few hours before Garibaldi’s red-shirted troops broke past the last redoubt of Papal troops holding the Porta Pia. A large, sadly smiling marble effigy of Pio Nono stands off to one side of the narthex in memory of this final papal ascent of Calvary.

The devotion is still very much alive, and the black-robed Passionist priests that tend to the shrine are busy day in and day out in their ministry. Masses in the side-chapel that stands at the head of the southernmost of the four stairs that flank the Scala Santa are crowded and ubiquitous, the faithful packed in tight. They’re also given to less conventional vocations: one priest had an artist’s studio tucked away directly beneath the treads of the Holy Stairs, while one more astonishing rumor mentions the Chief Exorcist of Rome, that celebrity devil-wrestler Gabriele Amorth who writes like St. Bernard and looks and dresses like a particularly saggy cousin of Uncle Fester. It’s said that he holds his exorcisms there, by appointment only, in the dark depths of the early morning, deep within the complex of chapels that cluster close to the old Papal chapel of San Lorenzo. The room, I believe, is soundproof.

On the whole, Amorth’s room would be one of the sights in Rome I’d sooner pass on seeing.

I don’t remember much about climbing the twenty-eight steps, just the rumble and squeak of the worn wood under my knees, the aching, the pain, a looming fresco of the Crucifixion at the top of the stairs full of boiling clouds and the sorrow of Calvary's darkness. I do, however, remember that long half-hour I stood at the top of the stairs as I waited and prayed and watched my friends, visiting from Notre Dame, make their own ascent.

It’s the defining image I have of that holy, melancholic place, where it seems to be perpetually sunset. The blood-tinged sun, swimming with motes, spills in between the spindly bars of the ironworked portal below, suffusing the turgid storm-green frescoes with fiery orange gilt, alighting on the dark hair and smooth silent prayerful faces of young women, on the sunken wrinkles of old men, on all ages and races and types of the universal Church. There are Indians, women head-scarved and men with bristling mustaches spiking their prayers with fantastic gestures, drawn-faced Frenchwomen in veils and young German girls with bulging student backpacks.

And then there’s me, kneeling at the step of San Lorenzo, beneath the worn, cracked marble slot marked Elemosina. I look in through the heavy iron latticework grate closing off the chapel, the Holy of Holies hermetically sealed from mere mortals. Three windows with grills connect it with the Scala Sancta, but it remains locked and empty save for those on a special tour. It’s a lonely, misplaced Holy of Holies, hemmed in by a series of oratories that form an irregular ambulatory around it ringed with altars, quire stalls, Stations of the Cross and confessionals.

But why this, and why here? Why isn’t the Sancta Sanctorum beneath St. Peter’s amid the moldy dust of the Vatican necropolis, or somewhere amid the Lateran’s airy vaults? At the height of the Middle Ages, it was the papal household chapel of the now-destroyed Patriarchum. Then, it was accorded the grand title of the holiest spot in the world on account of the numerous relics that graced its pophyried walls. Indeed, one of the earliest reliquaries still in existence was traced to this spot. Nonetheless, the ostensories and urns are now gone, taken back to the Vatican in 1903 save for one image that hangs above the old altar. It’s a smoke-darkened Byzantine image, given, it is said, to St. Luke by the hand of an angel. It’s armored with an ornate winged silver frame that covers all but the dusky face. Long ago, it was carried in procession through the streets of Rome by the powerful and select Archconfraternity of the Most Holy Savior; now, it lies forgotten behind the grill.

The whole chapel is something of a Byzantine Sleeping Beauty: the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia notes that nobody had seen any of the Sancta Sanctorum’s then-numerous relics since the reign of Leo X. Now, sadly gutted of these sacred souvenirs, it nonetheless seems to hold a heavy claim on the sacramental imagination, as if some trace of that ancient grace still clung to the chapel’s ancient walls like a poignant whiff of lingering incense. The old golden letters still declare, against the cobalt blue backdrop of the frieze over the altar There is not a holier place in the world, and Cosmatesque curls slither around the floors like Romanesque conveyor-belts. The thought that any place in the world, in these days after the destruction of the Temple, could be called holiest, has a hypnotic and shivering sort of fascination. Somehow whether or not the relics are here, whether or not even the stairs are authentic, doesn’t quite seem to matter, a realization which surprises me.

The Church has seen Her share of faked relics--the remains of the Maccabees once enshrined at San Pietro in Vincoli were discovered with horrific kosher irony to be pig bones--but Rome has plenty of the real, well-documented kind which date back to the earliest days of Christianity. Back when hanging on to a shard of Christ’s crib would have probably gotten you hauled up before a magistrate and sent off to be crucified in the circus. There wasn’t any profit back then in peddling off spurious bits of carpentry as the cross God died upon.

With the stairs, it’s more difficult to say whether they’re pious fiction or pious fact. The story, that St. Helena brought them back from Jerusalem, is certainly plausible enough. St. Helena’s archaeological expeditions are matters of historical record. The True Cross is enshrined down the street from the Holy Stairs on a church built on the site of her palace. Other myths have turned out to be just as true, when one remembers that the legends of the Vatican tomb of Peter were confirmed with startling accuracy less than one hundred years ago.

Still, the historian in me hesitates about the stairs: it’s certainly possible that Helena might have disassembled the stairs of the Praetorium--good Roman construction wouldn’t have gone anywhere in those two hundred and fifty years--and shipped them back to the Eternal City. Rome was rather good at that sort of thing, if the Egyptian obelisks that festoon the city grid are any indication. Yet, the first manuscript mention of them is merely in 844 AD, when the True Cross at Santa Croce had been a matter of common knowledge for centuries before.

But, perhaps in this one instance, I can afford to be credulous. The Church has a peculiar way of being right when you least expect it, in the little things as well as the great. And even so, there’s something holy about the place, just like all those piled-up relics rubbed off a bit of grace onto the now-bare walls of the papal chapel. Even if the God-Man did not walk upon these treads, plenty of men have done the same. There’s something dizzying to think of all the lives, all the miniature reenactments of salvation history, that are intersecting here beneath the dark gaze of St. Luke’s silvered icon. Even if it is a mere legend, the shared experience of faith and penitence that stretches back more than a millenium, from paupers to popes, is enough to make this place with all its sunset glory one of Rome’s most enduring holy sites. The stairs might be a pious fiction, but the prayers are real. And so Is the One they’re aimed at, staring piteously down from that stormy cross.

The last time I saw the Scala Sancta, it was a Friday in Lent, and a Stations of the Cross service in one of the upper chapels had just completed. A solemn mass would follow in the Basilica. A tide of pilgrims dripped slowly down the side-stairs, clustering in front of the humbly classical front of the shrine. Finally, they formed up into a procession, led by a layman in a windbreaker lofting a vast black cross bearing the crossed lance and sponge of Calvary. A black-robed Passionist walked alongside. They waited for a moment with their great cross and for a few astonishing minutes I was treated to the dubious spectacle of seeing a penitential procession stuck in traffic as they waited for the crosswalk light to turn green. The Lateran was cut off by a swirl of traffic.

But for all this modern incongruity, the Cross moved serenely onward, black against the deep warm blue sky, and soon they passed into the nave of St. John. They moved slowly through the immense bronze doors of the church, two-thousand-year-old doors that had once graced the portals of the Senate itself. I had never, not in all my months in Rome, seen them open, seen the Cross raised on high against the verdant green and pockmarked brown of suburbican Rome. The church’s great organ, the organ Handel had once played upon, began to sound, and we moved towards the gilded Gothic spike of the high altar like a crowd of medieval pilgrims. The doors were open, and the daylight was spilling in beyond the anthropomorphic silhouette of the Cross. The world was breaking into the church, the sanctuary was bleeding out into the world, and the veil of the Holy of Holies was torn in two.