My friend the Roman Seminarian has directed my attention to the travelogues of H.V. Morton, an English Catholic, in particular this little online gem which ends his book Through Lands of the Bible, detailing, among other things, a spectacular pre-Conciliar papal ceremony (involving pigeons, by the way) in St. Peter's. Well worth the read.

God’s Maytag Man Takes Tram No. 8 to Caesar’s Assassination

Adventures around here inevitably begin with an email, just as the archetypal Sherlock Holmes story begins with Watson fussing with the gasogene and reading out loud part of the Great Detective’s correspondence from some troubled soul. However, rather than picking up a letter from Miss Violet Hunter or the Count von Kramm, my informant is an old and familiar one, always well-anticipated.

My gentle readers are familiar with him under the simple and anonymous meme of “The Roman Seminarian,” and when I see his name in my in-box, it means I’m in for something unusual. I don’t know how he keeps track of so much going on in the Eternal City from up there at the Irish College, but because of him, I’ve partied in the high Bohemian manner with Czech priests, visited the site of St. Catherine’s death, and even gotten Cardinal Ratzinger’s autograph with my clerical-groupie friends.

So when last week I received an e-mail written largely in Latin from him, I was less surprised than most people would have been. It ran something along these lines, and was provided with a helpful translation below:

IULIUS CAESAR.

IDIBUS MARTIIS NEQUITER TURPITER IUGULATUS PIE SANCTE CONCELEBRATUR DIE SOLIS XIV MARTII PRIDIE IDUS IPSAS.

Conglobabuntur participes apud Templum Sancti Andrae de Valle hora 3:00
pomeridiana et ad horam usque 6:30 commemoratione illa occupabuntur...

In other words, the famous Father Reggie Foster Ides of March walking tour leaves from outside S. Andrea at 3 PM next Sunday.

Reggie Foster! Ides of March! Today was the fourteenth, and the famous tour was held the day before the actual assassination, March 15, 44 BC. I owed it to myself to check this out, not just because of the historical value—my hotel stands on the site of Pompey’s Theater, where the Senate was meeting and I had heard he had been killed—but because Father Foster, in certain strange and wonderful circles, is something of a celebrity. A weird celebrity, too. His name causes priests to spontaneously burst into laughter, and then sing the praises of his intellect. He’s the Pope’s official Latinist, has a show on Vatican Radio (appropriately misnamed “The Latin Lover”) and teaches at the Gregorianum, Jesuit intellect central. Beyond that, most everything about him is a large and delightfully elaborate question mark, even if that is a form of punctuation unknown to his beloved ancient Romans.

A sarcastic or hallucinatory journalist once referred to him as “fresh-faced Father Foster in his immaculate Carmelite habit.” Almost everything in that description is wrong. He’s a Carmelite all right, a discalced Carmelite who wears beat-up loafers and powder-blue Maytag man jumpsuits. The standard rumor is that if he wasn’t a genius, he would have gotten retired to a remote hermitage eons ago, though on what charge is a little unclear. I’ve heard him accused of everything from cynical crypto-Tridentinism to raving modernism and every heresy in between, though I wouldn’t have known unless I’d read it somewhere. He also, if the nickname “Wino Reggie” is to be believed, likes popping open a beer on occasion, which indicates he can’t be all bad.

So, at two-forty-five I found myself beneath the great travertine shadow of Sant’ Andrea, for once on time. My friend the Seminarian generally expects me to be late, considering the number of essays I’ve written that begin with me getting to mass in the middle of the Kyrie. Still, I was well-rewarded: the crowd that had gathered was just about as interesting as the tour itself.

The Seminarian later told me with a smile on his face that he thought “we were officially what is known as a motley crew.” And how. Students, Gregorian alums, even ordinary “Foster groupies,” as my friend put it. There were men in baseball caps; matched sets of pudgy children and pudgy mothers; priests; a black-robed Benedictine novice with a pale El Greco face and a vast shaven pate; an Anglican vicar with prim round-lensed gold-rimmed spectacles and a graying Rowan Atkinson bowl haircut; and several pleasantly pretty college girls. (People, I’m not made of stone, you know).

And then there was “fresh-faced” Father Reggie. He’s not fresh-faced; he’s far too interesting-looking to be handsome, his vast bald head, bull neck and florid face like an imagined Roman pugilist’s. Cracked veins stood out on his ruddy cheeks like an anatomical diagram. And I smiled, because I saw he was wearing his own habit—not immaculately Carmelite but distinctly and weirdly Fosterian. Yes, here he was, in powder-blue windbreaker and navy pants, looking all the world like God’s own Maytag man. I started scribbling down furiously, telling my Seminarian friend I was getting some local color.

The Seminarian continued to fill me in on the last few weeks since we’d seen each other, about the Lenten Station mass at San Clemente (the only service in Rome involving stomping on bay leaves, incidentally) where one of the congregants had started snoring as well as entertaining me with a falsetto version of part of the Dominican litany that only he could pull off. Like me a liturgical tourist, he also filled me in on the Syrian subdiaconal ordination I’d missed last week, saying of the tonsuring rite, that “any liturgy involving scissors has to be good.” This is why I like hanging around this guy, if you hadn’t guessed already.

Meanwhile, Father Reggie had started pulling out thick bundles of photocopies from a plastic shopping-bag filled with row upon row of Latin and dozens of classical floor-plans. And then he started talking. I noticed a bemused Benedictine smile on the novice’s face.

“Everybody thinks Julius Caesar was assassinated down in the Forum at the Senate House,” he began in his big, gravelly, raspy voice. “WRONG!” he bellowed. I laughed to myself. I knew the truth well; they'd moved it because the Forum Senate House was under repairs, they were removing (or installing) asbestos or something or cleaning up the blood from the last knife-fight. We were just around the corner from the Albergo della Lunetta, General HQ for me and the other arkies, set in a curious curved city block whose shape derived from, as I said before, the theater of Pompey that was built there two millennia earlier.

That meant—surely—that Caesar, the great G. Julius Caesar with his stupid bronze-cast haircut and memorable last words, et tu, Brute? had gotten knifed to death somewhere in the basement of the place where I slept. Heck, there was even a restaurant around the corner built in the old theater’s vaulted basement, and if you’re going to murder a dictator, a vaulted basement seems like just the right spot to do it. In fact, maybe that had something to do with the ghost sightings I’d heard rumors of a few months earlier.

We moved along the great blank brick side of the church, standing along the vast stuccoed curve of Largo di Pallardo. Somewhere above us was the window of my hotel room, overlooking history. It was odd, frankly, to think about it; the greatest Latin scholar alive (as well as possibly the strangest) was standing amid the parked motorini on a spot where I’d once spent three incredibly dull hours trying to draw the dome of Sant’ Andrea using a laundry marking pen for an incredibly experimental assignment. Campo dei Fiori’s lazy backstreets were now full of death and sex and violence, or at least historic sex and violence as opposed to the usual stuff garnered from taking a Roman taxi ride.

The Carmelite was talking loudly again. “We’ve got some pictures, the kids always like pictures,” smirked the Carmelite as we flipped through our packets. I dug out my map, and my heart sank. “You see where I’ve written ‘Cur. Pomp’? That’s the site of Pompey’s senate house, where Caesar got murdered.” I did some mental calculations, checking the diagram of the old theater against the modern street map. It had been part of Pompey’s marble multiplex, but certainly not the bit I called home.

Oh yeah, and Foster further added salt to the wound by telling us gleefully that Caesar didn’t say “Et tu Brute?” but something “IN GREEK!!”

Et tu, Reggie? Can I have just one little inaccuracy to call my own?

This isn’t to say Pompey’s Theater is chopped liver; Foster reminded us that the dedication ceremonies had looked like something out of Aida with elephants parading across the stage and a thousand jackasses, according to my notes, though the context is such I’m unclear if he means animals or people. Pompey’s Theater was, in greatly magnified and bombastic form, in the great tradition of the Roman illegal structure. The flat roofs of so many palazetti around here teem with dubious terraces, elaborate makeshift timber structures hung with curtains and green plastic shades, wild with ivy and TV antennas. Anywhere else, they’d be ugly, but like everything the Romans touch, they are beautiful and quaint, no matter how jury-rigged.

Regarding Pompey’s theater, well, I’m getting to that. Some people find it hard to believe the ancient Romans are the same people today that sell cheap plaster Augustuses from carts around the Forum or drive with the recklessness of Judah ben-Hur in the Circus. Caesar’s heirs may have conquered most of the known world, but the modern Imperator, Mussolini, had only Abyssinia and Albania to his credit, and with Abyssinia, it bears to remember that modern, united, up-to-date Italy had been beaten by the Ethiopians less than fifty years earlier at Adowa. Nonetheless, Pompey’s Theater is governed by the same insane loopholes that make the Italian world go round, except in even more spectacular form. You see, instead of building the illegal structure on top of a roof, quiet and simple in easy-to-take-down plywood, he did it in marble, and plopped the only legal thing in the whole place on top of it.

Theaters, stone ones anyway, were highly illegal during the Republic. Perhaps because the Tiburtine sybil had looked into the cloudy future and seen Alec Baldwin and Martin Sheen, the Senate feared the possibility of infama actors dabbling in politics, especially when declaiming inflammatory lines from stone stages in stone theaters that would make very convenient fortresses should Zero Mostel feel like taking up arms against the S.P.Q.R. Pompey, of course, being a high-roller, would have none of that, and put up his very own grand theater with stone seats and stage—and, as a spectacular legal dodge, plopped a temple to Venus on top of the whole extravaganza and told the architecture police that the stone seats were just steps up to the temple.

It’s stories like these that suggest that ancient Rome was more Caesar’s Palace than Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. That and those mysterious “thousand jackasses.”

But what about poor Caesar, lying on the floor of Pompey’s theater in a pool of blood? Reggie was reading his Latin again from the packet, as loud and vigorous as possible. He waved his free arm around, clenching and unclenching his fist with comic drama like a conductor keeping time for a student orchestra. It was church pronunciation, naturally, but the way he said it seemed centuries away from the sonorous, soporific Latin I was familiar with from daily Low Mass.

So. Caesar. Cicero seemed to be looming large here in G. Julius’s murder, even larger than the famous Brutus. After all, he was an ally of Pompey—and later a flatterer of Caesar. A very back-biting flatterer. “Cicero was a bum and a rat,” said Foster, his bright, idiosyncratically blue eyes crinkling with surprising humor. And what was his evidence for saying this? Two “abominable lines,” as he said grandiosely, quoting a letter from the orator to a certain Basilus. Tibi gratulo, mihi gaudeo; te amo, tua tueor; a te amari et quid agas quidque agatur certior fieri volo. Which means, “Congratulations, I am delighted! I am wholly at your service. I want you to be the same to me and to be informed of what you are doing and what is being done.” Written, most curiously, on the ides of March itself, it is said, at the first news of the assassination. “Good riddance to the old buzzard!” cried out Foster, mimicking Cicero on Caesar.

Actually, Cicero did not really have much to do with the dagger-wielding, but I get the impression he certainly liked the idea. “ ‘If I had been there,’ ” quoted the Carmelite, “ ‘there would have been no leftovers!’ ”

We trudged towards the site of the Senate House, worming our way down narrow grubby cobbled streets and dodging the occasion Kamikaze Roman driver. “The Latin is just out of this word,” said Foster, continuing. Caesar and Cicero were rival orators; indeed, Caesar’s prose “so lean and military—so mmmmmghrmpmpgh, wonderful!” obsessed Cicero. However, they hated each other, or at least Cicero did, especially when Caesar sent him a letter asking first about his work, ‘opes’ meus, which turned into a request for support from his bank account, ‘opem’ meus. That, coupled with the fact Caesar, as Reggie Foster put it, was plotting to take over the world in three weeks, didn’t improve things.

After all, he’d marched on Rome, conquered the city, and been hailed as everything from Consul-for-life to demigod. He’d also exiled Pompey, in whose senate house (which we had yet to find) and before the foot of whose statue he was to be knifed twenty-three times. postquam senatus idibus Martiis in Pompei curiam edictus est, etc. Stabbed twenty-three times in the curia . That’s a favorite magic number for Romans, and even Reggie Foster mentioned once being on tour when a man leaned out of a window and bellowed the sacred “ventitre!” Tell them he was stabbed twenty-three times! It’s important!

Caesar was obsessed by the title of King. He also liked cheese. He probably would have taken the crown proffered to him by Mark Anthony at a public ceremony if he hadn’t noticed the fact that the expressions on the crowd below resembled nothing so much as curdled milk, and I don’t mean parmigiano. But anyway, he had already been declared imperator (then more like Norman Schwarzkopf than Jean-Bedel Bokassa) and Pater Patriae, so what else could he do? The mess got worse when Caesar tried to have some tribunes arrested who destroyed a crowened statue of Caesar put up by Mark Anthony, and even worse when Caesar acted like a complete twit when the Senators arranged some ceremonial shindig in his honor. In all fairness, he was probably just a bit sleepy at the time.

Incidentally, the whole wreath of laurels thing had nothing to do with kingship: Caesar just put it on his coins because he didn’t want to look like he was losing his hair.

And so the situation continued to deteriorate. Caesar’s enemies, as they would later justify themselves, didn’t hate him because he was Caesar, but because he was going to ruin the Republic. “Not because he didn’t brush his teeth,” joked Foster, free-associating, “but because they didn’t like his politics.” Soon, Brutus was getting drawn into the fray, when he found someone had put a sticky-tab on the back of his chair in the senate saying Dormus Brutae! In other words, “Brutus is asleep,” since his family apparently had a tradition of stabbing tyrants with stupid haircuts. One of them had apparently done in the last Etruscan king, beginning the long Roman hatred of guys in crowns. Then things got even weirder, as Reggie informed us.

We were now standing overlooking the temples at Largo Argentina, the vast open archaeological wound that another would-be king, Mussolini, had opened in Rome’s fabric. It’s not the prettiest ruin around, overwhelmed by the clatter of the No. 8 tram and the enormous number of cats roaming around amid the broken columns and scattered beer bottles. A smell of urine predominates, as do cats.

The Largo Argentina temples are now a sanctuary for Rome’s cats. Somebody has taken to hosting a three-o-clock happy hour at a makeshift bar down in the archaeological pit, for reasons inscrutable even to the most sulfur-stoned sibyl. The Seminarian turned to me as we waited for the indefatigable Reggie to catch up. “You see, back after the Second World War, the Romans had to eat the cats to survive. And so, stricken by guilt, the commune passed a law forbidding anyone to hurt the cats of Rome afterwards.” Perhaps this explains the absence of meat in this city.

I was unable to continue this line of thought, probably fortunately, when Foster caught up with the group, craning over the metal guard-rail to look into the antique detritus. It seemed, he explained, that omens were everywhere that day. Brutus was ready to go, along with his fellow tyrannicides, while Cicero was gleefully standing on the sidelines writing incriminating notes even if it seems he wasn’t the brains of the outfit. The little sacrifice that morning—“to get things going, like daily mass,” he said, causing the Seminarian and I to burst out laughing—had gotten ahold of an animal with no heart, which, in addition to being anatomically impossible, really freaked out the augur. Pigeons had started attacking each other in mid-air near Pompey’s senate house, and then there was that weirdo soothsayer guy who approached Caesar en route on his meeting with destiny and twenty-three stab wounds.

Caesar wasn’t fazed by all this. “ ‘I don’t give a hooter-de-dee about religion,’ ” said Reggie Foster, translating the dictator’s thoughts imaginatively. “ ‘Poo on all that stuff.’ ” He ran into the soothsayer again and started taunting him. “The ides of March had already come! Everything’s okay! But,” said our guide, pausing dramatically, “ ‘They have come but have not gone…’ Oooooh!”

We were briefly interrupted by a motorino when the heavy slaughter began. Plutarch reported that the frenzy got so wild that Caesar’s assailants actually started stabbing themselves and running into stabs. They even got Caesar once in the groin when he finally fell down onto the marble pavement, the great dictator modestly covering his legs so he wouldn’t look unseemly as he crumpled, muttering “Kai sui tecnon?” to Brutus in Greek. “And you, child?” (Et tu, Reggie, must you repeat it?) And then one final little “Oooohhhpph,” according to Reggie’s version of Plutarch.

Like the old joke about Mussolini, with three hundred sharpshooters aiming at him and only getting three bullets, only one of the wounds was actually fatal. Unlike Mussolini, they didn’t put him on a meathook but left the corpse there for hours, running away and not knowing what to do.

Meanwhile, Cicero went into action, enjoying his moment in the sun even if he had had nothing really to do with it.

So where did they actually do the dirty deed? Where was this famous senate house (and who the heck builds a senate house in a theater, anyway?) Foster pointed down into the archaeological site and I whipped out my map. The far wall of the senate house was just visible, barely uncovered on the far edge of the vast crumbling pit, lost amid the reinforcing walls That meant…that meant that the site where one of the most pivotal figures in the history of the world went to his deserved or undeserved reward—was directly below the No. 8 Tram stop at Largo Argentina.

Next time I’m there, I’ll look for blood on the asphalt.

But the fun wasn’t over. Reggie turned to us and said we’d stop by the Forum for one final parting bit of fun, we’d go find Caesar’s statue and sing.

“Sing?” I said to the Seminarian.

An older woman, obviously a regular, overheard me and said “Sing, yes, and drink!” Now I couldn’t miss this, could I?

*

And so, with churchbells tolling the evening Angelus and evening settling over the sky, we found ourselves standing in front of G. Julius himself, the Via Fori Imperiali roaring at our backs. Foster finished up one final oration—the Seminarian jokingly called it “first Vespers of the Ides of March”—and the fun began.

Singing to Caesar’s statue is actually pretty mild stuff compared to the usual Roman reaction to the hallowed date of Caesar’s murder. If you drop by his statue on this secular and pagan dies natalis you often find piles of fruit at his feet as if a deputation of visiting Santería enthusiasts had hit the place during the night. Anyway, the offerings weren’t for G. Julius but for us. For, suddenly, backpacks miraculously disgorged bottles of fizzy cheap red wine and plastic cups were handed out. The Seminarian and I politely declined, almost simultaneously, but I admit it was bizarrely fun to watch. And then came the singing.

“Now, turn to the last sheet at the bottom, and we can sing the first couple of verses to the tune of the Ode to Joy and the last one to O My Darline Clementine.” Everybody now, together! Sing and raise your glasses! Ave Caesar!

Ecce Caesar nunc triumphat qui subegit Galliam,
Civiumque multitudo celebrat victoriam.

Gaius Iulius Caesar noster, imperator, pontifex,
Primus praetor, deinde consul, nunc dictator, moxque rex!

En victores procedentes, laeti floribus novis,
Magna praeda sunt potiti et camptivis plurimis.

Exsultantes magna voce io triumphe! concinunt,
Dum auratem ante currum victa oppida ferunt.

Legiones viam sacram toatm complent strepitu,
Capitolinumque collem scandit Caesar in curru.

O sol pulcher, o laudande, Caesarem recepimus
Et corona triumphali honoram vidimus!

And so we did, belting out überclichéd tunes to a dead, cheese-loving, crown-hating dictator whose name has adorned emperors from the Kaiser to the Czar as well as pizza boxes, Mexican labor agitators and casinos everywhere.

My friend the Seminarian had asked me earlier, with a jaunty tone in his voice, if I had gotten enough local color. It was the understatement of the month. This was the Eternal City, in all it sublime weirdness, incarnate. Our alcoholic salute to Gaius Julius seemed a wholly surreal, wholly Roman and wholly fitting way to end this afternoon of murder, mayhem and cats with this odd little clump of dead-language tourists and their impromptu chorale to the man murdered on Tram No. 8 two thousand years ago.

'Passion' rising toward box-office history

If The Passion continues on this trajectory, it's possible for it to surpass Star Wars [$461 million] and even Titanic [$600.8 million] as the domestic box-office champion of all time

In related news, word on the digital street is that Mel's considering more Biblically-themed movies, perhaps specifically a film on the Maccabees. First he articulates a beautiful understanding of Mary's role in the Christian experience for Evangelicals in The Passion, now his work might perk up Evangelical interest in Deuterocanonicals... If all this should come to pass, what official interfaith dialogue commission could claim more tangible success in promoting a gradual understanding and helping mend the fold?

All Praise to St. Patrick (and a word on the Holy Sponge of Rockall)

A happy St. Paddy's to all and sundry (and then some), that day of the year when melting-pot Americans celebrate the one-fourth or one-eighth of their blood which is pure Irish by drinking green beer (that would be blasphemous in Dublin) to solemnize a transplanted Romano-British aristocrat whose real name was Succat. But anyway, Go Irish! Expect further blogging soon on Fr. Reggie Foster (OCD) and the various adventures of my fellow Whapsters in Rome, once I finally get my latest round of projects done. An architect's work is never done.

In the meantime, for those of you in a satirical-ecumenical mood, if you think that your parish's liturgy is bad, check out this week's services at the Patriarchate of Rockall-Aquilea-Grado, the only autocephalous and autocratic Eastern Orthodox humor website online (link courtesy of the less-autocratic and equally funny Onion Dome). Trust me, if you're not laughing by the end of Vespers, you have serious humor issues. Also, in regards to the delightfully apocryphal St. Ermintrudis of the Sponge (and her peculiar childhood method of detecting heretics), remember that we at the Shrine invented St. Flutius first.

George Cardinal Pell, everyone's favorite orthodox Catholic Australian ex-footballer just walked down the street as I was having an aranciata at Cafe Sant' Eustachio with several acquaintences. He had been doing some shopping if the Barbiconi bag was any indication. I love this town! I decided to give him his space and not to hold him to his promise to me to visit my studio, if anyone remembers my essays about my clerical-groupie adventures during the post-Conclave celebrations. Now, Cardinals, they know how to party.

To the True King Over the Water!

For all your white-cockade needs, check out this fascinating Jacobite Gazetteer, especially the page on Rome. Santa Maria in Campitelli (also called "in Portico") has a particularly fascinating entry, considering it mentions that James III and VIII left an endowment to the church so that prayers might be said for the conversion of England. His son, the Cardinal Duke of York (above), was titular deacon of this parish for some time before moving to higher office, and doubtlessly nourished the custom. Some form of this prayer is still being said, apparently, at 6:30 PM every Saturday (you know where to find me next week), and goes a little somethin' like a-this...

Ecumenical Prayer to our Lady in Portico
Translation based on the official English text with corrections by the author based on the Italian

Most Holy Virgin, for many centuries
Thou hast made Thy maternal presence
felt in this community of believers:
hear the prayer which we earnestly make unto Thee
for all the Church of Christ and in particular,
for our brethren of the Anglican Communion.
Give unto us, in Thy maternal assistance,
a profound consciousness of our limitations,
that we might not be led astray by pride
and serve God with humility.
Grant to us, O Mother, that we might rediscover the way to unity
in the mystery of the Redemption
which has been won for us by Thy Son Jesus,
Who, clothed in the purple vestment of his Passion,
immolated Himself on the Cross for His spouse, the Church.
Enlighten the hearts of all with the light of the Gospel of truth;
praying in this Cenacle,
that Thy Son might send the Spirit of unity,
concord and pardon.
Gather once more all your children around the portal of salvation
to make one undivided people of the Covenant.
May, Mother, that day soon come in which all of us, in
concord, form a single flock under one Shepherd. Amen.

Spring Break in Rome:
Prologue: Porta Coeli

The doors! The doors! In wisdom let us be attentive.
--Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom

And so I stood there, late that Saturday evening, almost near that peculiar witching moment where it turns into the Lord’s Day, Sunday, and watched the door of my studio close and my visitors, my friends, disappear into the midnight darkness of the little Roman street beyond. It seemed like they had stepped through a portal into another world, like the exeunt of a stage-play, like the recessional of a mass. I’d called out, “Ite, missa est” to Emily as I caught a glimpse of her head turning back for one final glance. A shared sacred wisecrack among all my visiting friends, but perhaps that quotation, with all its holiness, was more appropriate than I supposed then.

The airport taxi would come at five in the morning. No reason to sleep, and they'd pack before they left, if they could figure out how to fit ten pounds worth of copies of the Vulgate into their suitcases (don’t ask). They spent their last night in Rome sitting on the Ponte Sant’ Angelo among the weightless but very physical Bernini angels, perhaps cold and milky-marble in the darkness. They gazed at the fiery orange and pale green floodlights that gave a subterranean cast to the dome of St. Peter’s, that great sacred breast of the Mother Church. It had been a grand success--they’d seen the Pope. Brian had gotten his Cardinal Ratzinger shirt signed, much to everyone's amusement. Andy had gotten his beloved statue of Our Lady of Mount Carmel after days of popping into stores and getting blank stares from shopkeepers at his question of Monte Carmelo? Or even worse, an attempt to palm off Our Lady of Victory on him instead. Shocking. You never know what those rapacious religious-article guys are going to palm off on you.

And so they waited. Em sat pensively at one end, singing snatches of Pange Lingua from memory (she’d been humming it all week along with Stabat Mater, while my friend S., my co-host, tried to fend off the stony chill and sat next to Andy, her good, great, gentle friend. Good, reliable Rich (perhaps a little too sober sometimes) had gone already to sleep, while I imagine Kristin spent her time dreaming of the Dying Gaul, the one thing she had come to Rome to see. And occasionally they teased Brian gently.

I was tempted to go after them, spend one last shard of time with them and ignore the clock with Carthusian gusto. But I had to leave as well, leave the Rome of pilgrimage and pastime for the Rome of work and thought. And so to bed. Though first, I turned back to the computer lab and found a grad-student friend of mine at a station. I realized I hadn’t seen Kate in three weeks--it was a jarring reminder of reality; and somehow she seemed oddly out of place even here where she belonged. My two worlds had passed like ships in the night--or perhaps like the Barque of Peter.

We’d both passed through our own door and life had returned back to normal. But, as I lay there in bed, waiting for sleep to close in over me and watching the dull neon-orange light of a Roman night cast vague and strangely-colored shadows on the walls of my bedroom, it was a comfort to think that they were still in town, somewhere--that unlike characters in a play, they were out there somewhere in the same universe, Andy, Brian, Rich, Emily, Kristin (and Stacy, who'd left the day before), and some day I would see them again.

Perhaps the last minute or so I spent with them seems an odd first chapter of my attempt to describe our visit, with its masses, its clerical celebrity visits, its silly religious humor and absurdist puns--someday I’ll try to explain to you about Rich’s elaborate gag about giving birth in the Gesu, his favorite church in the whole wide world--or even its moments of quiet profundity as rosary beads rattled and we paced around a silent Romanesque cloister praying in half-remembered Latin.

Or singing, for that matter, delightfully off-key looking over each other’s shoulders at a little Gregorian Liber Cantatus as we walked down a tiny Roman side-street in the shadow of Sant’ Ivo’s Babylonian spire of wisdom.

Pange, lingua, gloriosi
Corporis mysterium,
Sanguinisque pretiosi,
quem in mundi pretium
fructus ventris generosi
Rex effudit Gentium.

Before they left, they’d presented me with a little wooden triptych of the Virgin, and I found myself fingering it in my pocket the next day during mass. I’d wandered beneath a long-looked-for blue sky up to Sant’ Attanasio near the Spanish steps and taken a seat amid the dozens of guttering candles of the Byzantine church. A bearded face peeped out from between the curtains of the iconostasis, the gold and crimson robes making him seem almost as gaudily glorious as a Mandarin (gaude gloriosa--gaude, gaude Domine in laude) I stood and watched the scarlet-vested priests, deacons and clerks of the Greek College circle slowly around and around before the iconostasis and venerate a relic of the Cross with solemnity so rich and grave it bordered on comic.

It was a spectacular and unfamiliar scene, about the farthest I had ever traveled liturgically from the mass of Rome, and yet I was still in Peter’s royal city. The priests had formed up, beneath an ornate crucifix and the great silvered sunbursts of the liturgical fans, moving from one door to the nave as the choir boomed words with exotic masculine beauty. I found myself, however tired from my late night, singing along in Greek, in transliterated words off a crude song-sheet, in modes and tones I had never heard before.

The priests continued their slow progress, the celebrant bearing a great veiled tray on his head, blazing with candles like a Hellenic St. Lucia and weighed deep with flowers. If it weren’t so beautiful it would have seemed ridiculous, wonderful in its extravangant strangeness. Like so many of my friends’ esoteric jokes. Like trying to sing a Kyrie to the tune of The Lion Sleeps Tonight over dinner or calling the Graduale Triplex, with amusing but genuine enthusiasm, crazy-go-nuts with its elaborate scarlet-and-black chant notation.

We laugh at such things because we love and cherish them. We laugh because we believe. We sing with our tongues the song of the Savior’s glory, and occasionally share a joke with Him. This year, as I have said so many times before, has been a purgative one, a time to discover the adult in me. But perhaps I was trying too hard, putting on a long face without reason, being a dour puritan in my soul. Growing up doesn’t mean turning into Hamlet; serious times bring out serious feelings when they are truly needed. Grace and God and crises force us to show our quality, but in the mean time, a smile and a snicker, given honestly as a self-gift, is almost as good as a thousand “adult” frowns. Gallantry is the only way to face life.

And so I watched this foreign rite, with its flowers and gold-shot scarlet vestments, almost Buddhist or Chinese in its Asiatic splendor and triplex bows and crossings, like something one might have glimpsed centuries ago in one of those crumbled Nestorian parishes of central Asia or perhaps a court ceremony of the mythical immortal priest-king Prester John in Tartary or the shapeless Abyssinia of Renaissance cartographers that covered half the continent of Africa.

I kept fingering my triptych, something physical to hang on to. That my friends had come six thousand miles to spend a week with me, some of my favorite people in my favorite city amazed and gladdened me. I’d been afraid this year might cut me off, leave me out of the daily life of my friends, but to know they missed me as much as I had missed them, that unlike a character in a play, neither they nor me had vanished from our consciousness the minute we exited the respective corners of the stage, stood as a great comfort. I mean something to them--I am remembered. It sounds perhaps a trifle selfish, but I don’t mean it that way. Because I respect all of them so very much, and keep them in my prayers, to know that the same is true for them about me is a marvelous thing.

We all in some form or other image God’s love to one another, we become in a sense gates of heaven. Andy said something at dinner once this week that threw me for a loop for a second, that we all play the role of Theotokos--God-bearer, Mary the Deipara--at one time or other, and I’d at first assumed it was some amusing parody of modernist theology. But then he blurted out, “No, at communion!” and I understood wholly.

The Anaphora was being said behind the curtain, and there was a moment of perfect, kenotic, cathartic silence in the church after so many responsories. Strange metallic clinkings and clankings came from beyond the iconostasis, the jingle of thurible bells and the murmur of hidden words.

The little triptych sitting on the computer right now, my pocket triptych, has a scene of the Annunciation on it, that great proto-archetype of Holy Communion where Christ entered through the ear of a Virgin. And it seems wholly appropriate because I realized this week, beneath the wonderful and delightful veneer of humor and self-conscious Catholic Nerdiness, how much my friends bring God’s presence to me. There’s always that moment, somewhere, when someone drops the mask and you see God in them, holy transparency. I’ve seen it before when a joking, jocular priest ascends the altar and turns into another person, quite literally. Alter Christus, the inside face of the closed triptych.

It requires silence, emptiness, and most of all, not forcing it. You can’t force it. It comes when God wants it. It’s like loving God: it’s so difficult sometimes, and trying to do it from a mere emotion can swing from mushy sentiment into paralyzing, self-doubtful fear. Prayers feel arid, dry, and you realize you’ve been saying the words without thinking. But then you realize, like distant friends--more than that--like the ultimate friend and brother, the Lord loves you and all you need to motivate yourself to move towards that real love which is an act of the will and not mushy sentiment is to simply let yourself be loved. It’s a hard realization for some of us, and perhaps it smacks of that spiritual gluttony St. John of the Cross speaks of, but at the same time sometimes you simply need something to assure you of that grace, give you that fuel that will come through in the heroic minute when you throw off a favorite temptation. The love of my friends, all my friends, not just those who visited me, helps me grasp in some small way the love of God.

And so I found myself in line for the Sacrament at Sant’ Attanasio, watching the priest intinct the Body with the blood with businesslike solemnity. Leavened bread. The Greeks used leavened bread for the Eucharist. I felt momentarily, oddly disturbed as he placed the crusty substance in my mouth. Jesus, God help me, tasted like French bread and was just as hard. That familiar dissolving wafer, the sacred, subtle taste of the Eucharist, the sweet holy taste was gone--and then there was this instead. I knew it was the Presence--but something felt oddly wrong. And I found myself faced with the worst (and half-comic) nightmare of any closet Tridentinist: Do I crunch down on Our Lord?

Yes, you do, because you must consume Him. Because He’s in there too, even if perhaps more deeply veiled than you’re used to. Just like God’s invisible love or the memory of my friends so physically far away, He was most assuredly there, making a self-gift of Himself in the form of the holiest masquerade--the holiest irony--the holiest humor ever.

And somewhere, under the same blue Marian sky I saw the Sunday morning their plane left, Brian and Emily are trying to sing Pange Lingua even though they’ve forgotten some of the words.

Quotes from Rome, Part II:
Fun at the Vatican

Thursday morning found us in the driving rain looking for the entrance to the Teutonic College in order to hear mass said by Der Panzerkardinale Ratzinger.

"My professor found the first evidence for beer nuts in Western Civilization, and unsurprisingly, it was in St. Augustine." (Emily, of course)

"Why do you seek the living among the dead?" (Fr. Buckner, a fellow Catholic Nerd we met in supremely random Roman fashion, introduces himself at the Teutonic College’s cemetery)

"Deo Optimo Maximo...to God the highest thing. Literally, it means, Dude!!!" (Fr. Buckner deciphers a tombstone at the Campo Santo Teutonico)

"…and you'll hear lots of screams and a bunch of shouting in Spanish." (Fr. Buckner describes visiting the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, ex the Holy Office)

Rich: (to Kristin, who discovered she was disqualified for the papal throne along with schismatics and heretics) But you'd make a mighty fine anti-Pope in my book
Everybody: Awwwwww.

"Ha ha!" (His Revd. Eminence Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, upon Brian’s request to sign a tee shirt)

Then we shuffled off and waited in line under collapsing umbrellas to get tickets to the Musei Vaticani. It was definitely worth the wait, if only for the comments the exhibits resulted in. My friends, on seeing, at the Pinacoteca, a vivid painting of a zebra getting mauled by a leopard decided it would make an excellent painting for Cardinal Ratzinger’s waiting room…

"But I want the dumb zebra of heresy..."

"And paint a miter on the leopard…"

And on a smirkey bust of Pope Leo XIII:

"Anyone would look evil from that angle."

" 'Smiley-er than the average Pope.' That should be a slogan."

The previous day, there had been much pontifical fun as well, with the papal audience, a high point of the trip. However, the long wait led to general antsiness among the pilgrims:

"I wish they had a Pope impersonator to come out and entertain us." (Brian, on the joys of a two-hour wait for the papal audience)

"So you want a warm-up comedian for the Pope?" (Matt)

"At least it hasn't turned that ugly seventies yellow color." (Matt comments on the futuristic architecture of the Paul VI audience hall)

"Do you think they'll beam down the Pope?" (Brian comments on the futuristic architecture of the Paul VI audience hall)

"He looks like Luther!" (Matt attempts to describe a tonsured Augustinian he'd noticed)

"What if the Pope pulled a CP30 and started floating in his chair?" (Brian, once again)

Then there were comments on our neighbors, who seemed to be some Italian mountain troops in silly hats and a concourse of Protestant bishops in very Roman cassocks and very flashy episcopal jewelry:

"...killer pinnocchios..."

"I think only Pentecostal bishops are allowed to have bling-bling."

The audience itself was amazing; the Pope did not float in his chair, though he yawned a bit and blessed us. We all certainly had memorable thoughts about seeing him. But I think Emily should have the last word this time, considering in the space of two minutes afterwards we met respectively our old prayer-group leader from ND and a girl from my home parish in Tallahassee:

"You know you're Catholic when you meet more people you know in Rome than you would walking down the street at home."

The Templars Have Something to do with Everything

Umberto Eco watch out: it looks like someone has re-founded the crusading Knights Templar, and I don't mean in a weird, pseudo-Masonic way. Check out the Ordo Militiae Templi when you have a moment. Looks legitimate. Well, maybe. It's both fascinating and puzzling, as one simply doesn't expect some Italian guy to up and revive a long-dead group of warriors, and especially during the 1970s. While I consider myself the consummate layman (only a layman could be as clerical as I am), maybe I've got a religious order vocation after all...but only if I get to wear a sword with that habit!

Quotes from Rome, Part I:
Attack of the Jesuit Clones

Our excursions around Rome for the first day-and-a-half took us to the Pantheon, a museum dedicated to Purgatory, St. Peter's (where Emily decided St. Peter would have been amused by John XXIII's choice of burial footwear), and up and down Rome's nexus of weirdness, the Corso. However, the first place we took our intrepid and jetlagged friends was our studio on the Via Monterone. Upon seeing our mini-monumental marble staircase with its stuccowork and faux marble, the first thing Rich asked me was "Do you have a slinkey? Those stairs are just crying for something to go down them."

Slinkeys were a running theme the next couple of days. We nixed the idea of putting one on the Scala Santa, and decided only a baroque slinkey (with its curious diagonal capabilities) would work on the curvaceous Spanish Steps.

Monday and Tuesday were full of various adventures, including a visit to the Irish College where my friend the Roman Seminarian proved an energetic and engaging host, remembering "the Evil Photoshop Genius" and "the famous Emily" in addition to giving us a behind-the-scenes tour of the college that filled us in on the real dirt on Pope Joan (a local heroine of sorts), the story behind the clerical classic The Scarlet and the Black and the Pope's deranged Carmelite Latinist, Fr. Reggie. We also got a close-quarters look at a belled Byzantine thurible and the presence of Gaelic missals in the sacristy proved too much of a temptation for my friends not to snoop. We wondered what took them so long to get out of there.

Other escapades revolved around the Society of Jesus. We started off one day at the Gesu, where St. Francis Xavier's withered arm-relic got Brian off on a flight of paranoid-Jesuit fantasy:

"It's like the arm from the Terminator, they've got a Jesuit cloning lab where they're creating a whole army of Xaviers optimized for baptismal efficiency!"

The last sentence was said an an appropriately Ahh-nuld voice. Later on, we found ourselves at the baths of Caracalla, which somehow degenerated into a discussion about Carl Jung and Star Trek. Rich is our resident Trekkie, if you don't know already. Oh sorry, Trekker. My bad.

Matt: I'm talking about the show, and I haven't even seen Star Trek! They've passed into the collective unconscious of mankind!
Kristin: I feel sad I'm not participating in the collective unconscious of mankind.

Emily felt compelled to write that one down. The hilarity continued when Brian attempted to speak Latin in regard to his Polaroid--"Carpe camera!" which seems to mean, according to Em, "Seize the room." In general, besides my pseudo-Lord Clark lecture on the caldarium, tepidarium, frigidarium and crisper drawer, the discussion had very little do do with the baths:

"It's an ancient Roman garbage can! (Rich)

"...the hosarium aqueum maximum..."

"...and give up an opportunity to make fun of Biblical scholarship?"

Kristin: This photo will be titled The Boys Being Dumb.
Rich: We're expounding wisely.
Brian: Yeah, the four wise guys.

"These are very nice trash cans. Not very trashy."

Brian: I don't want to get near the mosaic floors. Think about it, you could get ancient Roman foot-fungus. A gladiator-sized case of athlete's foot.
Matt: But you'd be one with the past! You'd be experiencing the germs of antiquity!
Emily: Yeah, it'd be like catching Scott Hahn's cold!

Rich was, however, in awe of the ruined walls:

Rich: These are tall.
Andy: Sometimes at night I lie awake thinking of how tall the Roman baths are.

Brian later decided they must have had the tallest shower heads ever. And then the non-sequiturs picked up later, including whether I, being a resourceful architect, could rig up a Roman bath using chewing gum, toothpicks and, of course, duct tape. And then there were some Jesuit ones, largely courtesy of Brian's continuing fixation with St. Francis's arm at the Gesu.

"People would come and take Francis Xavier's fingers..."

"...his head fell off because they put him in a tomb that was too small..."

"If you're gonna quote something here in the baths, quote Gladiator or something, sheesh." (Emily)

"...bionic baptismal bicep..."

"....Spaaaartacuuuuus!" (Andy)

"...It's time to bust out Xavier's bionic arm..."

"You wait all your life for a Marian apparition and you get the Lactating Virgin!"

"...Gandalf the Pink..."

"You would leave the premises if the apparition of the Lactating Virgin appeared?"

"...try and bargain with the Lactating Virgin for a red martyr's crown instead..."

Pay attention, St. Bernard's miraculous milk-feeding came back to haunt us later over dinner. Then there was Rich's virgin pregnancy, caused by him wearing his camera case under his windbreaker in a most incovenient way. For some reason, we decided he was going to give birth to a Greek word rather than a person. I think this was because, when asked the gender, he thought it might be neuter:

"...The baby will be second declension male..."

"...poor Little Greek Verb with the broken declensions..."

"It's a Greek noun. I can't wait to see which one it is."

"There are no regular verbs in Greek, which doesn't bode well for the future of my child..."

"Hoi moi."

"Look, it's a plural!"

And then, there was dinner that evening. Dinner's always lively. The other day, it even included a mercifully-brief attempt to compose a mass setting to the tune of the Star Wars soundtrack and a Kyrie on the theme of The Lion Sleeps Tonight that sounded, quite honestly, like something by Guillame de Machaut or possibly a Greek Orthodox countertenor piece. S., my fellow arkie and co-host, dropped a pudding in front of Andy and told him she had heard that he ate the dish "in an unusual manner." This occasioned much hilarity, especially the pudding itself, which Rich said resembled nothing so much as a spleen with mono. And then there was more fun in various areas, including St. Bernard's taking a drink of mother's milk from Our Lady:

"...Listen to my theology of lactation..." (Brian)

"Am I the only person who takes this apparition seriously?" (Matt)

"Was Rich lactating?" (Andy; and please don't ask)

"Don't write that down." (Andy)

"Jesus didn't use silverwear."

"You mean, there's a Mormon among us?"

"...the fiery grape of doom. I've heard stories." (Brian)

"That's a sad attempt at a fez."

"...They have a priest, a rabbi, a mufti...hey, that sounds like a joke..." (Matt explaining a Tom Clancy novel)

"...C-section with a pudding spoon..."

"Blackbeard had a whole ecosystem in his beard."

Then Andy began to tell extravagant whoppers about how the recorded voice at the end of the Vatican escalator says, "Ite, missa est." Actually, it was a deacon, not a speaker, and on feast days they have a couple of deacons who sing it in modes. Meanwhile, Rich had mentally returned to the Capitoline Museums where we had spent part of the day, and in particular Kristin's favorite statue, the extremely nude Dying Gaul (who to me seems to resemble the villain from the Sherlock Holmes story The Solitary Cyclist but then that's another story):

"I'm sorry if I don't live up to your expectations of masculinity, but if I were to go into battle, I'd put on armor...or at least pants."

However, dinner didn't show any more bionic Xavier jokes. Nonetheless, jesuit wisecracks have been something of a running joke this trip, as we discovered during our trip to Sant' Ignazio the night before. Naturally, the location of the Blessed Sacrament was of crucial importance:

Andy: Look for the light.
Matt: There it is.
Andy: No, that's a plant.

Altar decorations at Italian churches are most puzzling. In my defense, the shiny red tinsel on the pot did look a lot like a vigil lamp. The altars themselves are often equally strange, as we discovered studying an uber-baroque reredos in rather bold green and yellow marble:

"It looks like bad furniture from the seventies...the beginnings of bad Jesuit taste."

Still having not found the tabernacle at Sant' Ignazio, we knelt down in front of the altar of Saint Aloysius and said a rosary (for the mystery of the finding of Our Lord in the Temple, appropriately enough) and halfway through the Gloria Patri, I was interrupted by very loud and very comic liturgical muzak being piped through the speakers. Emily leaned over to me and said, "Welcome to Italy." Indeed.

It ain't Rome...


While I will be going to Italy, I'm in Texas for most of this week. Next week, I'll be joining my family and parish, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, for a tour of the north. We'll be going to Turin, Milan, Genoa, Verona, Padua and Venice. While I won't get to see the JP II or Ratzinger, it will be a definite church hunt. With Verona (home of Romeo, Juliet, and their balcony) and Venice (said to be the most romantic city in the world, I'll let you know), Solomon's hit will be the trip theme song. I've heard it's been nominated in several categories in the upcoming Vatican Music Awards.

Cancun, Dude!


None of the members of the Shrine will be spending Spring Break in Cancun

..........Or not.............but as Andy noted, it is Spring Break, and thus 4/5 of the Shrine staff will in some way or another be touring Italy, and I will be in Virginia and New York. Thus, blogging will be slim to none. Stay tuned, however, for the blog's return to full operation next Monday, which will surely feature many stories and insights gained over the break. Thanks to all our readers: your loyalty is very inspiring, and is a big part of what keeps this blog going. For everyone's information, I offer a link to a site called Mary's Prayers Rosaries, which links to us and seems to be a nice clearinghouse of information and links. Check it out, and enjoy some of their material and links until we return. Once again, thanks and God bless!

From one dome...


Image credit

to Another...


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Viva il Papa!

The Coolest Reliquary Ever

My astute friend from the Shrine's comments-boxes, the Roman Seminarian, informs me of a fascinating artistic-hagiographic-liturgical curiosity he recently was priveleged to see: as he puts it aptly, the "coolest reliquary ever." Listen:

Imagine, if you will, something looking like a 9" [by] 5" photograph frame split into 12 compartments. In the centre of each compartment is a 2nd-class relic of the [Blessed Virgin Mary] surrounded by 30 or so fragments of bone. Closer inspection reveals the whole to be a calendar, each compartment standing for a different month and each chip of bone representing the saint of the day.

Sweetness! Or perhaps I should say, dulcedo et spes!

Militant Catholic Nerds Sack Rome's Clerical Boutiques to Enrich America's Impoverished Liturgy

And You Think Attila was Bad:
The Whapsters take Rome, and Other Amusements

I'll probably knock off at least one more entry before I head off to the Eternal City tomorrow afternoon, but I just thought youall should know (or be warned) that several of my blogging confreres will be joining me in Rome in a few days for a week of pilgrimage, adventure and (hopefully) a little mayhem. This group of hardy souls will include The Shrine's very own Andy, Emily and our absentee evil photoshop genius Rich. Also, fellow Domer and Catholic nerd Brian of In Pectore will be joining the hoopla. We've got high hopes for the trip: 33 churches, three opportunities for pope-watching, a tour of the Scavi beneath St. Peter's, mass in at least three different Rites, and even one prospective Ratzinger sighting. No, seriously.

We decided on 33 because, of course, its Christological significance, but also because last year when Andy, Dan and myself did The Dan Rober Reality Tour of New York we found when you've seen sixty churches in the space of a week, all those Gothic altars start to run together. On the other hand, Rome is baroque, and you can never have too many flying cherub butts, as my good friend (and Romanesque partisan) Fr. O. would probably not say. So, like all good barbarian hordes visiting Rome, expect death, destruction, pillaging (and a few rosaries) in the next week or so. You'll get plenty of updates, trust me.

Also, tonight, I'm attending the Votive Mass of the Holy Spirit being held at St. Thomas More in Tallahassee, always a big occasion for lawyers and government folks in this capital town. So, lots of liturgical fun in store.

Disturbing News

Going good in the North, not so good in the West, thanks to California's courts. Constitution...what's that?

South Dakota

South Dakota's legislature passed this bill last week making abortion a felony in the state. It was sent to the governor today. He hasn't said anything about this particular bill but he is pro-life. Planned Parenthood has said they'll sue as soon as it's signed, so it won't have much effect on things. But it's still worth it, at least to my mind, simply because it brings up the subject again in the courts. This particular bill has such a strong stance against abortion that hopefully the Supreme Court will take it up. Not that that will do much good since it is anti-life, pro-death pro-choice, or whatever you want to call it. At least it puts the topic back in the spotlight. The idea is, at least according to some Right to Life rumors I've heard around campus, that a large state will do the same. The only ones I can even think of doing something like this are Florida, and of course, Texas. For now though, I don't think this bill will end up doing anything significant, but simply the fact that it's happening is amazing; it shows how far we've come.

Wait just a darn second...it's February 29...and you know what that means...

...It's the leap-feast of St. Flutius of Bologna! That is, the (utterly fictitious) patron saint of the left ankle and origin of the the (surreal) rationale behind the Shrine's equally surreal name. Break out the ankle chaplets and mortadella! It may be Lent, but this is a huge excuse to par-tay! Happy Anklemas, everybody, and let's not forget to sing our favorite Flutius Carols:

Here we go a-Whapping
Among those trees so bare,
Here we go a singing,
That what they did to Flutius simply ain't fair.

Good Metatarsils to you,
And a happy Whapping too,
And St. Flutius keep you and free you
From all athlete's foot,
And St. Flutius keep you
From all athlete's foot.

Incidentally, this reminds me of my favorite Ash Wednesday Carol, ascribed to our favorite priest-turned-chimney-sweep St. Rodney. Here's one modern translation Becket and I worked out from the fourteenth-century Middle English:

I'm dreaming of a purple Lent
Just like the Lents I used to know,
When ashed foreheads glisten
And confessors listen
To hear crotalii in the pews, the pews...

Okay, time to take my medication.

Mary's Fiat



Fr. Jim already blogged this new classic from
The Curt Jester, but it was so good I had to include it again here. I especially appreciated the rosary over the rear-view mirror.

The Highest Praise the Shrine Has Received to Date

It wasn't from Commonweal, or from Fr. Sibley or even Fr. Jim, but from fellow Hapsburgophile Mr. Otto Hiss, who, in an expansion of my post of il Superpapa which uncovers as-yet-unknown papal hijinks from the Pacelli years, memorably calls us "an Ultramontane Monty Python troupe." Jawdrop! When we redesign the sidebar, trust me, that's going in there next to earlier lauds like Scipio's "In der katholischen Weblog-Szene hat sich blitzschnell," which is equally Germanic but slightly more incomprehensible.

More Quotes Recorded by my Arkie Friend S.

Amusements heard in Rome:

Deacon Dave: What was your paper on infant baptism called?
John the Seminarian: [It was] Burn, Baby, Burn.

Prof. Duarte on the Society of Jesus:

“Jesuits know how to have fun.”

“Given the decoration of this church, it is safe to say God was a Jesuit.”

(I won’t dignify that last one with a response.)

“This week’s class theme was ‘places St Andrew’s head has been.’ ” (S. describes Duarte’s class.)

“I keep expecting Padre Pio to tell Luke to use to the force.” (Me, on the subject of the seer of Pieceltrina’s eerie resemblance to the late Sir Alec Guinness)

Prof. Duarte: Does anyone know what ‘Alhambra’ means?
Student: Rug?
Prof. Duarte: Close, but ‘Red Fortress.’ They both start with R.

First Student, after misreading some church iconography: St. Peter was a Nazi?
Second Student: No, the Etruscans were Nazis.

“This is typological brooding artist bullshit. He killed himself and burned his drawings. What a dumb-ass.” (Prof. Duarte commits sacrilege against the name of Borromini)

And lastly, on the matter of how to properly celebrate the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception:

Me: I love being Catholic. You get to paaaaaaaaaaaartaaaaaaay.
Alejandro: You say potato, I say vodka.
Me: I mean come on, Catholics invented beer.

Well, it’s true.

Just in time for the Lenten festivities, everybody's favorite Hohenzollern (or is it Hapsburg?) posts T.S. Eliot's grand Ash Wednesday over at Otto-da-fe.

Super Pope: Need I Say More?

Okay, while the folks at Tradition in Action are somewhat on the humor-impaired side (jaw-drop!), I still have to give them kudos for digging up the wonderful photograph posted above. Even if their intent wasn't quite as benevolent as mine is now (oh come now, so what if His Holiness is enjoying Himself?), I forgive them. Primarily because they seem to like my ancestor Blessed Charlemagne and my favorite Brazilian Monarchist, Prof. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira. While you're at it, have a look at these delightful shots of the Sovereign Pontiff. Hey, it may not be the Pacelli touch, but it's still just as cool. JP Two, we love you!

Brother Martin's Problem

The indispensable Cardinal Ratzinger Fan Club Blog features a salutary article on Luther's scrupulosity, the forgiveness of sins and trust in God's mercy. It makes for fascinating reading, especially given my schizophrenic relationship with Luther.

I'm as triumphalist as Trent but yet I enjoy a Lutheran hymn as much as the next Lake Wobegonian--and may I remind you, a seventeenth-century Lutheran service had more Latin in it than an American Catholic mass today. But it's not just a matter of music or liturgical aesthetics. I've always felt Luther was more of a sad figure than a contemptible one, for all the troubles he brought upon his Mother, the Church.

In some sense, he couldn't help himself. He had a dark and gloomy Teutonic mind obsessed by superstition, werewolves and scatological diatribes. Some people paint him as the first modern, but I think he was, in his own strange and sad way, the last medieval. I should elaborate on that and say his was the mind of the plague-ridden, death-obsessed fifteenth century rather than the glorious, gilded, Thomstic thirteenth; his was the dank halloween Gothic of twisted dead trees rather than the gaudy carts and rainbow robes of the great Mystery Plays.

Considering Luther belonged to neither time and had the bad luck as a man out of time to be stranded in the hedonistic and Machiavellian High Renaissance, his sad rending of the Church's unity takes on a sense of tragedy rather than malevolence. It seems Luther, poor, pitiable Luther took Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott to mean God's warm embrace was as comfortable as sitting on cold stone, not that the Lord as permanent and mighty as a mountain. "Divine mercy trumps divine justice," as the ingenious gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha said once.

While perhaps there's those of us who need to remember God's justice, the flip side of the coin is just important lest we think God's oceanic grace insufficient to heal us. While I'm not suggesting we kick off our shoes, stuff ourselves silly or put our feet up on the ottoman this Lent, it's still an infinite comfort amid the sackcloth and ashes. To quote Luther himself, grasping for the truth even amid his own personal nightmares:

And though this world, with devils filled, should threaten to undo us,
We will not fear, for God hath willed His truth to triumph through us:
The Prince of Darkness grim, we tremble not for him;
His rage we can endure, for lo, his doom is sure,
One little word shall fell him.

Perhaps what he didn't realize is sometimes that little word is simply Confiteor.

Looking for Borromini
Part II: Solomon’s Seal, or the Cube and the Sphere

Matt continues his meandering journey through the life of the tragic architect Borromini, his great obsession with Solomon’s Temple and other the artistic and theological issues of the Counter-Reformation.

The next day at the library, it rained, and I strolled around campus inhaling the sweet smell of damp grass, pleasant decay and ozone. Ferns clustered on the overhanging live-oak limbs, while off in the distance above the red-brick Gothic campus buildings, a gash of blue sky had opened. I found my mind wandering.

I’d spent the previous summer working on a vast watercolor rendering of the Temple of Solomon commissioned for a book on church architecture. I’d come to the FSU library as part of my search. The reconstructions I’d finally selected showed a remarkable Assyro-Babylonian fantasy of scarlet winged cherubim and lapis-lazuli tile, crowned by a vast tiered porch almost two hundred feet high. It looked more like a ziggurat out of Abraham’s Ur than the humble abode familiar to us from protestantized Bible illustrations.

There are about a million different versions of what Solomon’s Temple might have looked like. None of the modern archaeologists agree, naturally, and neither did the artistic greats and antiquarians who’ve tackled the problem over the centuries. Designs range from the prosaic to the bombastically ludicrous, some with steeples that look like St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields or others with vast above-ground sub-basements out of Bladerunner. Yet others, less imaginative and more archaeological, are unpromising pseudo-Egyptian affairs stuffed with random cherubs that seem too dryly accurate to be real.

The version I’d selected as the basis for my drawing had been drafted with beaux-arts precision for, of all things, a Biblical theme-park planned for 1920s Philadelphia. It seemed to square with the biblical descriptions, had some historic kudos behind it, and the elaborate iconographic program seemed suitably Catholic enough. Plus, the copyright had presumably run out by now.

But seriously. Solomon’s Temple, home of the old covenant, might seem an esoteric place to begin the study of church architecture, but for the architects of Borromini and Borromini’s generation, the complex fascination with this strange and wonderful structure was the be-all and the end-all. The Solomonic problem was the union of two great Renaissance obsessions, transformed but perhaps not wholly pietized by the mission of the Catholic Reformation.

The hierarchy, that sea of bobbing white mitres sitting enthroned in the stark duomo in Trent, was faced, in church after church, with the last two hundred years’ attempt to baptize antiquity. Had this conversion of the spoils of paganism allowed, in that infamous turn of phrase, the smoke of Satan to mingle with the incense gathering beneath della Porta’s great dome at St. Peter’s?

The Council fathers turned momentarily to austerity, recalling the simple icons of early Christianity. The vast, travertine churches that began to rise over the tiled rooftops of Rome were austere preaching-halls for the new orders of Theatines, Jesuits, Barnabites, the purity of the ancient church recalled in their simple stone Christograms and intertwined martyr’s palms. Offensive and exhibitionist plans with their centralized and a-liturgical dispositions were banished in favor of the simple Latin cross, with its prominent altar and grand processional nave.

Yet, the world of the classical, the world of the divine sphere rather than the divine trinity, lingered even in the forms of the Corinthian pilasters that decorated the dour facades of so many of these new basilicas, remained suspect even in its simplest form. The rising generation to which Borromini would belong would rediscover ancient classicism in a new and different light, cleansed by the flames of the Holy Ghost that would be depicted in stucco and gilt in so many frescoed lanterns of the next hundred years. Strangely enough, though, the ultimate roots of that new purgation would come from an unexpected and perhaps suspect corner of the Western mind.

While its roots were ostensibly Biblical, there was another influence, that of the world of the alchemist, the esotericist who revered the divine cube of the new Jerusalem of Revelation, the nine-square taxis of Solomon’s Temple.

The Christian intellect in history has sometimes had an uneasy relationship to its Judaic origins. St. Jerome befriended rabbis in his scrupulous search to discover the significance of every last yod as he transmuted Hebrew into the Vulgate at his hermitage in dusty Bethlehem, but not long after, St. Augustine had only felt it necessary to use Latin in his pursuit of the truth.

As the Renaissance approached, intellectuals threw off, for better or worse, medieval decorum and caution and turned once again to the calligraphic black flammules of the Hebrew alphabet. A small group of ecstatic rabbis, scattered across Spain, Provence and Germany, had long proclaimed that the very shapes of the letters were sacred and contained the secrets of the universe revealed to Adam, Seth and Abraham. Kabbala, they called it, meaning tradition, from the handing-down of this secret teaching through the centuries. Supreme power might be theirs, if only they could find the correct combination, the correct sequence of yods and taus and alephs that made up God’s secret name.

Gentiles started to listen to this group on the fringe of Judaism. There was always the deep-down feeling that perhaps the wandering, homeless Jews hadn’t quite told them just everything about their secret and sacred tongue, presumed by many to be the language Adam had spoken in paradise—or perhaps its simplified offspring from which the new and perfect tongue could be resurrected. Babel might have broken that linguistic ideal, but Zion could reanimate it by the kabbalistic power of the letters.

Christian scholars thus went back to the original Hebrew. Sometimes it was for sincere reasons of translation and truth, but just as often it was for disturbing and nearly magical purposes. The pseudo-scientists of Germany ransacked Hebrew lore for talismans and studded their weighty tomes with Solomonic seals and sinister pentagrams that had supposedly passed down through a chain of obscure and heterodox adepts from the hand of shadowy and suspect figures like the spurious Archangel Raziel. Surreal linguistic gymnasts set out to prove spurious etymologies, trying to claim that Kabbala actually meant the name of Jesus Christ in Hebrew. In sunny and seemingly sane Italy even Pico della Mirandola’s attempt to Christianize the Kabbala resulted instead in a Kabbalization of his Christianity.

The Judeomania of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries bore more wholesome fruit as well. While brooding and dark Philip II of Spain had been touched by the alchemical gold-bug, the specter that had lingered behind Paracelsus’s ravings and Cornelius Agrippa’s tables of astrological signs, in his case it became something far more grand and sane and Catholic in the form of the Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo de la Escorial. It was the monastery of St. Lawrence of the Gridiron, conceived in the image of the God-given plan of Solomon’s Temple.

The sordid Gentile occultists of Trier and Prague might have scrambled to find dark double-meanings in the simple sanity of language, but Philip had simply trusted and taken scripture at its word in the description of Solomon’s real temple and Ezekiel’s visionary sanctuary. Indeed, four hundred-odd years later, Errol Flynn would die at the Escorial while filming a grand black-and-white biblical epic entitled Solomon and Sheba. Philip’s great reproduction had become, in a weird pre-post-modernist twist of fate, the thing itself.

Here was a true new beginning, a true divine font for the architecture that Rome was struggling to re-Christianize. After all, it came neither from suspect occultists nor hedonistic demi-pagans. It was the mother taxis, confirmed by God’s own word.

In Part III, we return to the Escorial, chat with a bishop on the fringe of the Church who wrote rules on how to break the rules, and walk amid the seraphim of Borromini’s greatest achievement, the Solomon-inspired Lateran Basilica, an achievement tainted by a brutal beating and murder—at Borromini’s own hands.

For the Italian in All of Us

Italians vs. Europeans

Matt, this one's for you. And for anyone who hasn't been to Italy or doesn't know any Italians, take my word for it: these are all so true it's scary. Ma scherzo cari, scherzo.

Saint Rodney, Patron Saint of Ash Wednesday


Saint Rodney distributes penances to the children of London on a snowy Ash Wednesday morning.

Everyone loves Ash Wednesday, but who knew it had its very own patron saint? Saint Rodney, you see, was an English priest in the 14th century who doubled as a chimneysweep in order to raise funds for his poor parish. Thus, it is unsurprising that he would have been associated with Ash Wednesday, especially considering his major miracle, the "multiplication of the ashes" at a church running short of the important sacramental. Now, legend has it that if one is really contrite to start off Lent, Saint Rodney will come and hear his confession, and if it is a good one, will give him a BIG penance! (Like getting a pony for Christmas!) And if you don't have a chimney, don't you worry, because Saint Rodney, like his pal Saint Nicholas, is quite happy to use the door, if necessary.

Let us all praise Saint Rodney in song (To the tune of "From All Thy Saints in Warfare"):

All Praise to you, Saint Rodney, you were a Chimney Sweep,
You Heard the guy's Confession, when he was in too deep.
And now you come Ash Wednesday to hear us tell our sins,
So that we might be holy and purified within.

The Question We All Ask...

Do Sundays in Lent count??

A fair, balanced perspective by Fr. Hamilton.

I say they do. Leaking out on Lenten sacrifices is for the weak ; )

In the News
Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum. Habemus scaenam!

I was paging through the latest edition of Commonweal, only to discover an article entitled St. Blog's Church, by one Rachelle Linner, commenting on the proliferation of Catholic blogdom. A quick quote:

"Given that their generation has little fear of technology, numerous college students maintain blogs; of note is the Shrine of the Holy Whapping by 'Catholic Nerds' at Notre Dame."

9 months ago, I don't think any of us anticipated a citation in one of the most circulated Catholic periodicals..!

Reading the article, however, one notices an unfortunate bias with which Linner paints St. Blog's -- essentially calling the vast majority of blogs a reactionary phenomenon. In this I think she is being somewhat dismissive; at any rate, I hope that label is not confused with our Shrine by association.. We've blogged more about the power of Cheese than Church politics. Yet one gets the impression that Ms. Linner would be a bit stunned that a member of St. Blog's would even have a subscription to Commonweal. Despite, in my opinion, her tendency to create an exagerated dichotomy in the Church (does a preference for, say, incense, truly constitute a "Catholic culture war"?), it was still quite interesting to read about St. Blog's on the printed page.

Looking for Borromini
Part I: Narwhal Spires on the Road to Babel

It’s a bit ironic to travel four thousand miles in order to research the history of a building two minutes walk away from your school-desk, I thought as I headed to Strozier Library. Strozier faces a big, grassy quad in the heart of Florida State University in my very own home of Tallahassee. And I was spending the first weekday of my vacation here to uncover the arcane secrets of Sant’ Ivo della Sapienza, the meerschaum-white church whose narwhal-cum-Dairy Queen spire slips past me almost every day in Rome as I walk from my hotel to our studio in the Via Monterone.

It was, for all the redundancy of my visit, a beautiful morning. The sun was dappling on the grass, the air was alive with the sound of construction equivalent and there was even a pleasant homeliness to the uninteresting brick buildings that stood half-hiding behind nests of Floridian foliage. It’s strangely therapeutic to be around so much green after two months in Rome’s travertine jungle.

Rome’s a city of stone and stucco, and the slightest invasion of sap and branch seems strangely scraggly against the white-marble acanthus of so many Corinthian columns. They seem fig-leaves against Rome’s heroic antique nudity, masking some gap in the urban fabric, some Mussolinian disembowelment or Savoyard imitation Champs-Elysees. They seem faintly comic, like the weeds that must have grown in the Forum when it was known, as on the eighteenth-century Nolli plan, simply as the Campo Vaccino, the cow pasture.

FSU, on the other hand, runs riot with real foliage. Sometimes it’s covering up the fact that the buildings on this side of campus are ugly red-brick Miesian contrivances, lacking the crocketed and floriate Jacobethan nicety of the older dorms. Still, today I’m inclined to smile on this architectural dubium. I don’t know what it is, but I’m liking this place.

I find myself glad to be back on campus, even if it isn’t my own. For one thing, I’m finally old enough not to get weird stares from the students in the copy-room when I haul down my research to the sacrosanct Xerox sanctuary on the second floor of the ungainly and anti-classical brick box that FSU uses to imprison its sacred texts.

I hauled my parents over here once in eighth grade to dig up info, of all things, on Pope Pius VII for a novel that I planned to write and which never got beyond about chapter six—and on top of that, I’d never gotten to starting chapters two or three in between. I’d largely forgotten about the place until last year when I’d ferreted out info on Solomon’s Temple for an architectural rendering I’d been asked to deal with over the summer.

And now I’m back. Something about the monologue running in my head and the eager young minds flashing past me en route to class or clustered around the steel-tubing picnic tables makes me feel like I’m at the beginning of a movie or a WB sitcom. Maybe I’m the comic relief; I’m not normal enough to be the everyman hero. Come to think of it, though, the library’s not American Gothic enough to be in a movie. Even in Rudy they used the Law Library when good old Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Library with its trippy sixties Diego Rivera-meets-Vasco de Gama mosaics didn’t prove photogenically hoary and academic enough.

The computer lab seems to be almost completely full. An Chaldean-looking young woman in a loud headscarf is reading a website detailing Islam’s doctrinal bloopers, while another coed has something up with the mysterious sub-heading of “Get Sexual.” I choose not to enquire and find an empty seat around back. After ransacking the electronic card-catalogue, the first sentence of the relevant tome I find in the NA 1100s shelf will ask me, “Why read a book on Borromini?”

It’s a reasonable question. Borromini. Francesco Borromini, 1599-1667: Italian Swiss by birth, Roman by death. Stonecutter by necessity, architect by vocation and pride. Cavaliere of the Order of Christ. Killed by his own hand, absolved of his sin before he bled to death. Buried in consecrated ground at San Giovanni dei Fiorentini near the end of the old Via Giulia. His body rests under a simple marble slab a few feet away from the altar and the grave of his mentor Carlo Maderno. Generally called a Gothic barbarian by his contemporaries, a madman by scholars, and the greatest architect of the Roman baroque by history.

Something about this man’s tortured life and effortless genius fascinates me, whether for morbid or wholesome reasons, I can’t say. Even back before I could tell him apart from the other nebulous panoply of goateed genius that surrounded settecento Rome I was clumsily copying the bizarre snail-shell spiral of the church of Sant’ Ivo, his greatest work, in grandiose sophomore projects.

In short, before I knew Borromini, I was Borrominian.

We have a strange sort of friendship, Francesco and I. His troubled brown eyes and aristocratic mustache stare down at me from a postcard taped up over my desk, the crusader’s knightly cross displayed on the silken folds of his mantle. No matter where I wander in Rome, Borromini’s mathematical and deviously exhibitionist curves eventually catch up with me. His Solomonic cherubim gaze down curiously at me from beneath a high undulating cornice as I walk to school. On my weekly stroll up the Via XX Settembre, the bizarrely contorted front of his church of San Carlino lurks over my shoulder at the Quattro Fontane. His memory haunts even the closest evening mass to my hotel, the vast dome of Sant’ Andrea delle Valle designed by his hand. Sometimes, despite the rushed penitence of his death, I wonder if perhaps his soul still dogs my steps.

On the other hand, the card-catalog entry on the computer in front of me is not helping much. Old Borromini is, for once, evading me. I was hoping to find art-historian (and, apparently, Soviet spy) Anthony Blunt’s great work on the man here, but it appeared to be on loan until March 8. Perhaps they have it at Patrice Lumumba U in Moscow.

Meanwhile, as I scan down the 15 titles on the menu, I’m faced with irrelevant extravagances with German jawcracker names like Fünf Architekten aus fünf Jarhunderten: Zeichnung von Hans Vreideman de Vries, Francesco Borromini, Balthazar Neumann, Hipoyte Destailleur, Erich Mendelson: Katalog zur— Oh never mind. He’s in there, but only if you can pry him out with a Teutonic crowbar. There’s also a book by Borromini himself, but it’s also equally unpromising, as it’s also only available in a German translation. On the other hand, he was born in Switzerland, after all.

Even more extraordinary is another title I find, a pamphlet dated 1669 (by one Elizabeth Atkinson, curiously enough) with the occult and conspiratorial title of Breif and plain discovery of the labourers in mistery, Babilon, generally called by the name of Quakers with a discription of how the subtile serpent deceived them and made them proud boasters, calling the tower of Babel, which they are building in their imagination, Mount Zion, and so on and so forth for what seemed like pages. It seems apparent to me that the FSU web catalog was not my friend in my endeavor.

Or was it?

Proud boasters. Babylon. Tower of Babel. Mount Zion. Occult and conspiratorial. Atkinson’s work might not have a direct connection to Borromini, but she, however unconsciously, had brought together the two great symbols of his life. Zion—Jerusalem—Temple. Temple Mount. The Temple of Solomon, the object of Borromini’s greatest obsession. And Babel, the mount of human futility and despair, the despair that killed the great artist. And thereby hangs a tale of theological mystery, esoteric experiment and even a murder, that, in the end, would enfold all the courts of Europe and direct the fate of the Catholic Church.

Read on in Part II as Matt discovers the Solomonic problem, meets two eccentric and long-dead Jesuits, pays a mental visit to the Escorial and finds out what Philip II of Spain, Errol Flynn and St. Lawrence have in common.

Quotes from Rome

My friend S. has been compiling various amusing remarks overheard over the last semester or so among fellow arkies, professors and our various seminarian pals. Here’s a representative sampling. Names have been changed to protect the guilty.

“To collect the strange animals was trendy.” (Prof. Marconi, on ancient Roman pets)

“He’s an Italian-American seminarian gigolo.” (John the Seminarian, on a classmate)

“Italian grocers are genetically deficient.” (The inimitable Fr. O.)

“Are any of you ordained Jesuits?” (Prof. Duarte, being charmingly irrelevant)

Prof. Marconi discusses politics: And if you look to your left you can see the ugly facist building.

“Jesuits know how to have fun.” (Prof. Duarte)

Prof. Duarte: I’ve never seen an episode of The Simpsons.
Student: But, but, but...how do you know anything, then?
Prof. Duarte: Who told you I know things?

John the Seminarian on his calling: I’m a seminarian. That means I have a big long title, lots of ugly clothes, and very few responsibilities.

“The Counter-Reformation was similar to Notre Dame recruiting.” (Prof. Duarte)

And lastly, for the wall of shame, this anonymous quote:

“Being in Italy is like living in Olive Garden.”

Monarchists and St. Ann's

Maybe it's proof of globalism or just head-spinning coincidence, but it's more than a little surprise not two weeks after a chance meeting with Mr. Theodore Harvey, monarchy- and music-enthusiast, while waiting in the dark in front of San Gregorio in Rome for a Latin Mass that turned out to have been cancelled, that I should discover everyone's favorite Rooseveltian conservative, Mark Sullivan, praising Theodore's monarchist reporting on Irish Elk, regarding the fascinating history and sad closure of St. Ann's Armenian Cathedral in New York.

(I dare someone to diagram that sentence.)

Anyway, perhaps I'm a less fervent royalist than I was in tenth grade, when my political affiliation was not so much Republican than Carlist. Sort-of. Or during freshman year at Notre Dame when I used to wear the Sacred Heart of the Vendée to parties and sing the Legitimist Marsellaise as I marched to class. Nonetheless, I still am perfectly happy to drink a toast to the true king over the water, make fun of Louis-Philippe's umbrella and wear a white cockade on Bastille Day. Le sangue des bleus rougira nos sillons, and all that. So, then, have a gander at Theodore's Royalty and Monarchy Page; anyone who likes kings and things and is a fellow Floridian has got a lot going for him already. And while you're at it, check out his story on the Requiem for Louis XVI at old St. Ann's, with a guest appearance from our friends at the Society of King Charles the Martyr and a Hapsburg archduke. Come now, we've all got a little monarchist inside of us, don't we?

Scrambling at the last minute for a Lenten penance?

Pat Madrid has the answer.

You Know the Sibleys, but do you know the 2004 Victor is Awesome Awards?

As the Catholic blogosphere's resident Hiberno-Hispanic knight-errant, I resent not receiving the Most Quixotic award.

Home Again

Well, so the architecture program three-week spring break begins. I'm spending the first two weeks back in Florida with my family; a well-deserved rest in the ancestral manse sitting by the fire and catching up on my blogging, writing, drafting and other projects academic, intellectual and pleasantly mundane. I won't say it isn't disorienting to see English labels on the Nutella in the pantry or realize the teller won't accept the Euros in my wallet, but I will say I'm glad to be back in familiar surroundings, if only for a little while. I've already done the inaugural bike-ride, nine miles. Great way to shake off the jet lag.

And so afterwards, it's back to Rome, where some of my blogging confreres (and consoeur Emily) and other representatives of Notre Dame's extensive Catholic Nerd community will be joining me for a wild and cuh-razy week of Roman church-hopping and gelato-consumption in the Eternal City. Yes, I know it'll be Lent, so we'll only eat purple ice-cream. Until then, it should probably be a quiet couple of weeks on this end, though I'm going to be on the blog plenty: expect follow-ups on my Roman adventures and posts on the down-home pleasures of the Florida panhandle. Also, I expect to be communing with my carnivorous side and eating plenty of that American red meat which seems to be so thin on the ground in fair Italia. Yum.