Articles of faith

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This was published 12 years ago

Articles of faith

True devotion ... an angel stands sentry at St Peter's Basilica at the Vatican.

True devotion ... an angel stands sentry at St Peter's Basilica at the Vatican.Credit: Getty Images

Susan Chenery is fascinated by Rome's churches and religious relics.

In the early morning, the Roman heat rises. The worn old streets are thrown into sharp relief as the sun hits ochre walls and bounces off cobblestones.

It's August and the city is lethargic, exhausted, half asleep; shutters closed, restaurants and cafes shut; emptied of Romans who have decamped for the holidays. The river Tiber runs low and sluggish. As I dodge the scooters, the lovers, the flocks of nuns, the languages of many nations, I am on a mission. A private pilgrimage. I'm looking for relics.

The cult of relics is hard to avoid in Italy. There are alarming reminders of the great and good everywhere: body parts, bones, blood, snippets of cloth, the dismembered mortal remains of the sanctified. Disinterred saints are exhibited in churches all over the country.

I have been close to tears seeing the patched-up tunic of St Francis of Assisi - mainly because his meagre threads would not have come close to keeping the poor chap warm in winter. I've been morbidly fascinated by embalmed saints with funeral masks lying in glass cases. It is said that St John the Baptist must have had at least eight heads to be in all the places that claim it.

But in Rome, where there are thousands of relics, it gets really macabre. The Roman Empire wasn't a lot of fun for Christians 2000 years ago: bits and pieces of them are still scattered across the city, preserved and decoratively displayed. Many of the tourists melting in the heat have no idea what they are walking past or upon as they tramp streets that have witnessed epic moments in history.

These relics are often unheralded. Those who visit Il Gesu - the first Jesuit church ever built - with its tortured statuary, frescoed ceilings and lush baroque paintings, might be startled if they looked up and clocked the black mouldy arm of St Francis Xavier encased in a round gold reliquary on the wall. This is one of the weirder relics in Rome - an arm with shrivelled flesh still clinging to it. Francis was one of the seven monks who, with St Ignatius of Loyola (buried here), founded the Jesuits. It was apparently with this actual arm that he converted about 300,000 people in India and Japan.

After he died in Goa, orders came from Rome that he was to be dug up, his right arm cut off and his remains reburied in India.

It gets even more ghoulish, though, at the Capuchin ossuary on Via Veneto. Here in the unprepossessing Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini are what Mark Twain described as "the picturesque horrors" of the bones of friars turned into art. There is, evidently, a lot you can do with bones. In six chapel vaults, visitors are greeted by grinning skulls that line the walls and ceilings, some with hair and skin still attached: a crypt of pelvises; a crypt of leg and thigh bones artfully arranged.

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Then it gets really creative, with massive bone lanterns, elaborate lamps, intricate hangings, great circular floral designs and biblical scenes made from femurs, tibiae, spines and collar bones. A central rosette formed by seven shoulder blades, an arrangement of jawbones decorated by vertebrae, eight pointed bone stars, bony coats of arms. And standing creepily in arches made from ribcages are entire skeletons dressed in brown habits, one chillingly holding a scythe made from bones. At the end is a little sign with a slightly sarcastic message: "What you are now, we used to be; What we are now, you will be." Having read that, you almost expect the bones to rattle, like some kind of B-grade horror film, as skeletal fingers reach out to grab you.

Outside in the heat, back among the beautiful living, I rapidly re-evaluate matters of taste and death. And this is the point, says New Zealander Dr Christopher Longhurst, who has a doctorate in theology from Rome and is an expert in religious imagery. "This is a branch of theology that deals with the end of life, the end of the world, judgment," he says. "As St Paul says: to die in Christ is to live. So, 'Death, where is thy victory? Death, where is thy sting?"'

But lampshades, Dr Longhurst? "They are arranged in the designs purely to become works of art and therefore on a certain level to destroy the negative association with death."

Moving on swiftly, I am heading to "the mother and head of all churches of the city and the world", St John Lateran, the cathedral of Rome, the original Christian church built by the first Christian emperor, Constantine, in the 4th century. Here, in this great cavernous temple of marble and gold, are allegedly the heads of the the apostles St Peter and St Paul high up in a gilded cage, sitting on bronze busts.

There's some question as to whether St Peter even came to Rome and these skulls were missing for several hundred years during the various sackings of Rome. So I'm not entirely sure what the sad-looking priests and Italian women with big hair and push-up bras are venerating when they fall to the floor but they certainly look as if they mean it.

They are on their knees, too, over the road at La Scala Santa. Here they are climbing - on their knees - the 28 stairs in the palace of Pontius Pilate upon which Jesus Christ walked towards trial and judgment.

Now encased in wood - since it would not be right for mortal feet to tread on the stones that Christ's own footsteps have sanctified - there are nevertheless peepholes helpfully cut so pilgrims can venerate his bloodstains on the marble.

Not easy on the knees, I am grimly informed by one pilgrim.

The rarest and holiest relics are those associated with Jesus Christ himself. Down the road at Santa Croce in Gerusalemme are relics of the Passion.

Amazingly, apart from me and a strange man in blue robes with a staff who has materialised everywhere I have been, there is no one else in the relics room and there appears to be minimal security. Accompanied by piped choral music, you can wander up to a glass case above a table altar and see one of the iron spikes that were used to crucify Christ, two of the thorns from the Crown of Thorns - long and nasty, very nasty - and a fragment of the True Cross, all on what look like candlesticks topped by glass holders.

The True Cross bears the word "Nazarene" written in Latin, Hebrew and Greek. Here, too, is the grey mummified finger of St Thomas, the Doubting Thomas who sceptically poked Jesus's spear wound following his resurrection. Mediaeval legend has it that these relics were brought to Rome by Constantine's mother, St Helena, hidden from the invading Visigoths and not found again until the 15th century. You have to wonder if this is for real as the choral music fades and the welcoming roar of the Roman streets takes its place. And, if so, why are these in this dank, unlovely, unvisited church and not with St Peter in the most expensive monument to Christianity ever built?

St Peter's Basilica at the Vatican was designed to inspire awe and it does. Shafts of celestial light drift down from the high windows of Michelangelo's dome to the exquisite red-and-green marble floors.

What Mark Twain described as "one of the greatest human achievements" is so vast and high that the visiting humans seem as insignificant as ants, which perhaps was the intention. Here among the great pillars and general magnificence is a gallery of colossal statues of saints.

One of them in flowing marble robes, a curly beard, enormous stone thighs, one mighty arm thrust out, the other holding a spear is St Longinus, the Roman soldier who thrust his lance into the already-dead Jesus, causing blood and water to pour from his battered body; and who immediately converted. That spear is kept in the shrine to St Peter a couple of metres away. In the reliquary above the equally dramatic Bernini statue of St Veronica is the veil with which she wiped away his sweat on the way to Calvary, supposedly leaving the imprint of his face.

St Peter in Chains, the church where the chains that bound Peter in Jerusalem are kept hanging in a glass box, is closed when I visit.

Supposedly the only bodily relic that Jesus left behind - his foreskin - is outside Rome, in provincial Bomarzo, in Latium (modern-day Lazio). A rival church in the Abruzzi has challenged this claim with its own Holy Foreskin.

Seeing the relics raises more questions than answers for those of us who like hard evidence. Relics were big business during the superstitious Middle Ages. Relics brought pilgrims and pilgrims brought money. (Rome hasn't changed all that much, come to think of it.) There were fakes, forgeries, stealing and trading, plundering armies. Who had the presence of mind to collect souvenirs during the trauma of the death of Jesus Christ and where were they in the couple of centuries before these relics showed up?

"It really doesn't matter," Longhurst says, "if it is not Paul's or Peter's cranium because it is what the Christians believe it to be that is more important. There is something in human nature that wants to transcend the physical, and saints and relics provide the sense of transcendence. What relics do is remind us of the glory of those who died for Christ."

In other words, you just have to take that leap of faith.

FAST FACTS

Relics tours in Rome with knowledgable guides are run by Sentia Rome Tours; see sentiarometours.com.

Il Gesu, the Jesuit mother church, is at Piazza del Gesu, Via degli Astalli. Tram: Argentina. Open daily 7am-12.30pm, 4-7.45pm.

Capuchin Crypt is in the Church of Santa Maria della Immacolata Concezione, on Via Vittorio Veneto 27, just off Piazza Barberini. Metro: Barberini. Open daily 9am-12pm, 3-6pm, closed Thursdays.

Saint John Lateran, the first church built and the ecumenical mother church for the world. On Piazza di San Giovanni in Laterano. Metro: San Giovanni. Open daily 7am-6.30pm.

La Scala Santa, which has the stairs from the house of Pontius Pilot, is at Piazza San Giovanni in Laterano. Metro: San Giovanni. Open daily 6.15am-noon, 3.30-6.30pm.

Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, which houses relics from the Passion, is on Piazza Santa Croce. Tram: Piazza Di Porta Maggiore. Open daily 6.45am-7.30pm.

Saint Peter in Chains houses the chains that bound Peter and Michelangelo's famous Moses statue. On Piazza di San Pietro in Vincoli. Metro: via Cavour. Open daily 7am-12.30pm, 3-6pm.

St Peter's Basilica, at the Vatican, is open daily, 7am-6pm, in October-March. It's best to go early to avoid long queues. Free entry.

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