A Favorite Church

One of my favorite churches in Rome, probably for its uniqueness of design, is San Stefano Rotondo located on the Caelian hill, not far from such other wonderful old Churches as San Gregorio Magno and SS Giovanni e Paulo.  The Church is entirely in the round, being built in imitation of the Anastasis, the circular aula over the tomb of Christ in Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher.  Pope Leo the Great authorized the foundation of the Church but it was only built twenty years later or so by Pope Simplicius between 468 an 483, making it one of the oldest churches in Rome and unlike many of the more prominent churches has been little altered over the years.  The church was built at the behest of the Valerian family—one of the most ancient and noble Roman families—who owned much of the Caelian Hill.  Saint Melania the Elder was a member of this family and she had made frequent pilgrimages to Jerusalem and in fact had died there.  This may have influenced the choice of a circular plan for the Church.

Twice in its history the Church had attracted the notice of papal patrons who poured considerable wealth into its embellishment.  John I and Felix IV decorated the church with marble and mosaics in the sixth century and Innocent II reinforced the fabric of the building in the twelfth century.   Through most of its history, however, the church was quite neglected, even to the point of being at times roofless.  In 1454 Nicholas V took the church from the Canons of the Lateran who had permitted it to become almost ruinous and gave it to the Hermits of Saint Paul, a Hungarian Order of Mendicant Friars and this began an association that continues today of San Stefano Rotondo with the Hungarian nation.  Hungarian Jesuits took over the Church from the Pauline Hermits in 1579 and under the Jesuits the church received its most notable decorations that last until today.  It was the time of the great Jesuit missions and Jesuits in their spreading of the Gospel were being put to death in the Protestant nations of Europe, among the native Americans and First Nations of what is today the United States and Canada, in Japan, Korea, and many other places around the globe.  Ignatius’ Society of Jesus was being baptized in its own blood.  It was important to inculcate in the Order’s novices the spirit of Martyrdom.  The church was under the patronage of Saint Stephen—the first martyr—and what could be more fitting than to encourage a spirituality rooted in willingness to shed one’s blood for Christ.  Under the aegis of Pope Gregory XIII, artists Antonio Tempesta and Niccolo Circignani carried out a series of 34 murals depicting the martyrdoms of various saints in the first centuries of the Church’s history.  They are remarkably grisly: a real house of horrors.  Charles Dickens described it thus

Charles Dickens may have put it best, writing of his visit of the "hideous paintings" that cover the walls. He wrote,

…such a panorama of horror and butchery no man could imagine in his sleep, though he were to eat a whole pig raw, for supper. Grey-bearded men being boiled, fried, grilled, crimped, singed, eaten by wild beasts, worried by dogs, buried alive, torn asunder by horses, chopped up small with hatchets: women having their breasts torn with iron pinchers, their tongues cut out, their ears screwed off, their jaws broken, their bodies stretched upon the rack, or skinned upon the stake, or crackled up and melted in the fire: these are among the mildest subjects.

The altar in San Stefano Rotondo is placed dead center in the circle on an axis that runs from northwest to the south east, giving the presider a choice of which position to face.  Of course when the Church is full, the congregants surround the priest on all sides.  It is one of the peculiarities of the ancient churches of Rome that they were not built facing east but face every direction of the compass. 

The Blood of Martyrs Is The Seed of Christians

Martyrs of the 20th Century--
Great West Door of Westminster
Abbey

This past Sunday I noticed a middle-aged man get up and storm angrily out of Church when the priest mentioned the martyrdom of Archbishop Oscar Romero, bishop of San Salvador, who was murdered while saying Mass in 1980.  Though Father did not mention that the Archbishop was murdered by American-backed forces in the Salvadoran army, the very mention of the Archbishop and his upcoming beatification obviously stirred the memory of this gentleman and triggered his anger.  It was particularly surprising as our parish, while somewhat heavier than we would like with us “late middle-aged” folk, is pretty liberal, both politically and religiously.   But the mention of the murdered Archbishop, as the preacher was saying, is a reminder that the age of martyrdom is not over. 

Over the great West Door of Westminster Abbey in London, the gothic niches have been filled with statutes with the “Martyrs of the 20^th Century.”  Archbishop Romero stands among them.  In addition to Archbishop Romero, the Catholic Church is commemorated with the memorial to Saint Maximillian Kolbe , the Polish Franciscan who, in 1941, voluntarily took the place of another prisoner in a starvation cell at the Nazi Auschwitz Concentration Camp. 

The Anglican Church is represented by Manche Masemola, Archbishop Janani Luwum, Wang Zhiming, Lucien Tapiedi, and Esther John.  The Orthodox Church is represented by the Grand Duchess Saint Elizabeth of Russia, and the Protestant faith by the Lutheran Dietrich Bonhoffer and the Baptist, Dr. Martin Luther King. 

Martin Luther King, of course, is familiar to us Americans as the great preacher and apostle of non-violence who led the Civil Rights Movement in the United States from the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 until his murder by a white racist in 1968.  Just as attempts were made to tarnish the reputation of Romero by his foes both in El Salvador and here in the United States, King was subjected to character assassination by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI who wanted Americans to think that the preacher was a Communist agitator in an effort to discredit his objectives of an America in which there was an equal opportunity for all regardless of race. 

The Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia was a German Princess who married into the Russian Royal Family and converted to Orthodoxy.  (Her younger sister also married into the Romanoffs—married Nicholas II and became the Tsarina Alexandra.)  Elizabeth’s husband, the Tsar's uncle, the Grand Duke Sergei, was assassinated in 1905.  The young widow sold her jewelry to fund a convent of Orthodox nuns who worked among the sick and poor.  She herself headed the convent as its Abbess.  She was arrested during the Revolution and like her sister, the Tsarina, was brutally murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918.   

Manche Masemola was a young South-African woman murdered by her own family in 1928 for converting to Christianity from the traditional tribal religion.  Esther John similarly was murdered in the Pakistani Punjab region in 1960 for having converted from Islam to Christianity.  Archbishop Janani Luwum has a story much like Archbishop Romero’s.  Luwum was primate of the Anglican Church in Uganda and spoke out against the reign of terror in Idi’ Amin’s Uganda just as Romero had spoken out against the death squads in El Salvador.  He was arrested and died in police custody.  When the body was released to the family, it was riddled with bullet wounds.  Some present claimed that Idi Amin had personally shot and killed the Archbishop. 

Dietrich Bonheoffer was a German Lutheran Pastor who, with other Lutherans formed the “Confessing Church” when they found that the official Lutheran Church was collaborating too closely with the Hitler Regime.  Although already in prison by the time of the 1944 plot to kill Hitler by placing a bomb in the conference room where the dictator was meeting with his staff, Bonheoffer was connected with the would-be assassins.  He was hanged on April 9, 1945—just a few weeks before the fall of the Nazi regime.  

Lucian Tapiedi was a Papuan New Guinea Anglican lay evangelist who was killed during the Japanese invasion of that Island during World War II. 

Wang Zhiming was a Chinese Protestant brutally murdered during the Chinese “Cultural Revolution” in 1973  in a stadium before a crowd of 10,000 (mostly Christians) in an attempt to terrorize Christians to give up the practice of their faith.  These ten figures from different parts of the Christian family alert us to the sufferings of Christians today.  Christians in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, India and other countries often hold on to their faith at the cost of their lives. 

When I lived in Rome, I always attended a very special prayer service each Holy Week sponsored by the Community of Sant’ Egidio to commemorate those men and women who in the 20^th and now the 21^st century have laid down their lives for their faith.  We too should remember them—the blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians.  

What May Be Francis' Most Dramatic Break With Tradition

Rumors are flying around that when Pope Francis comes to the United States in October he will continue on to El Salvador where he will canonize Archbishop Oscar Romero, the Archbishop of San Salvador who was murdered by  an assassin from the American backed Salvadoran military in 1980.  The interesting aspects of this canonization is that Romero has not yet been beatified—the normal preliminary step to sainthood—and there as yet no approved miracles to testify to his sainthood. 

Romero was born on August 15, 1917 to carpenter Santos Romero and his wife, Guadalupe de Jésus Galdámez in Ciudad Barrios, El Salvador.  He was one of 8 children. The family does not seem to have particularly devout as the child was not baptized for 20 months after his birth, yet Oscar himself was drawn to the churches in town even as a very young child.   There were only three years of formal schooling available to him but he was tutored by a local teacher and at age 13 went off to a high-school seminary.  His father, a practical man, had wanted him to be a carpenter and the boy showed promise in that trade, but wanted to be a priest.  His intelligence was noticed in the seminary and he was eventually sent to Rome for theological studies and he was ordained in Rome on April 4, 1942.  World War II was raging at the time and on his way back to El Salvador, Father Romero and his companion, Father Valladares were imprisoned in Cuba as they were coming from Italy, then an Axis power.   He was soon repatriated and took up pastoral work in his native region in eastern El Salvador. 

Romero was by nature a conservative and a pious man.  He did what for the time and place were some innovative things such as establish Alcoholics Anonymous groups, but by and large he was given to supporting the traditional devotions and pieties of the Salvadoran peasants. 

El Salvador had from the time of its independence from Spain been controlled by an oligarchy sometimes called “The Fourteen Families.”  (There were, in fact, more families than fourteen, though they were all inter-related through marriages and had common interest.)  These were the great landowners of Spanish blood.  Their children were sent to Cuba or Mexico or even to Spain and other European countries for education.  They lived on large estates farmed by peasants of Native American or mixed blood.  After independence their cash crop was indigo from which an expensive blue dye is produced, but by the latter part of the nineteenth century the economy had switched to coffee production.  90% of the land was owned by this small number of wealthy families.  The Constitution was written to give these families a majority of seats in the national assembly and they—or their client families—held the officer positions in the military.  The military controlled the government by a series of dictatorships from 1931 until 1979.  A 1932 peasant rebellion led by Farabundo Martí was brutally suppressed with the murder of over 40,000 Salvadoran peasants.  In 1979 the government of General Carlos Humberto Romero Mena was overthrown by a conservative but reformist military junta that realized unless there was some economic and land reform the situation in El Salvador would be untenable and the country would be vulnerable to an extreme left-wing (read Marxist) power-grab.  The American government under President Carter, and later President Reagan, supported to the Junta, while Cuba and more left-wing governments supported the FLMN  (Farabundo Martí Liberation National Front) rebels.  This led to a violent civil war.  In an attempt to suppress the rebels the Salvadoran Army, under command of the Junta, was often responsible for indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, most notably the El Mozote Massacre in 1981. 

The teachings of the Catholic Church regarding a just social order—teachings rooted in the Encyclicals of Leo XIII, Pius XI, John XXIII, Paul VI and the decrees of the Second Vatican Council—were a powerful stimulus for the poor of El Salvador to seek social change and this left priests, nuns, and lay catechists vulnerable to attack by Junta forces who saw the work of the Church as supporting a more radical social change than they were prepared to make. 

Meanwhile in 1970 Romero had been named auxiliary to Archbishop Luis Chávez of San Salvador and four years later given his own diocese of Santiago de Mariá, a poor rural diocese.  In 1977 Paul VI named Romero to be Archbishop of San Salvador in succession to Archbishop Chávez who reached the mandatory retirement age of 75.

Romero was, as I said, a pious priest of a more conservative bent.  He was certainly no political activist.  But like many holy people, he did not limit himself to those with whom he agreed but had friends across the political and theological spectrum.  Among his closest friends was the Jesuit Rutilio Grande.  Grande worked among the peasants, catechizing them and raising their consciousness to understand that the sort of social dysfunction where wealth in concentrated in the hands of a few while others lack necessities is contrary to the Gospel and the Kingdom of God.  Rutilio Grande had huge influence among the peasantry and his message became a threat to the existing social order.  In a famous homily he declared

I am fully aware that very soon the Bible and the Gospels will not be allowed to cross the border. All that will reach us will be the covers, since all the pages are subversive—against sin, it is said. So that if Jesus crosses the border at Chalatenango, they will not allow him to enter. They would accuse him, the man-God ... of being an agitator, of being a Jewish foreigner, who confuses the people with exotic and foreign ideas, anti-democratic ideas, and i.e., against the minorities. Ideas against God, because this is a clan of Cain’s. Brothers, they would undoubtedly crucify him again. And they have said so.

On March 12, 1977, Grande and two lay associates travelling with him were ambushed and killed.  Romero heard of the murders and went at once to the church where the three bodies lay.  After celebrating Mass there, the Archbishop spent hours listening to the stories of the peasants who had gathered their to mourn.  Unable to sleep, he spent the night in prayer and underwent a deep personal conversion where he realized that the Church, if it were to be faithful, could not stand silently by while the poor were being driven ever deeper into the dirt but had to stand with them and for them.  He said that as he looked at the body of his friend,  he thought “If they have killed him for doing what he did, then I too have to walk the same path” The morning after the murders, Archbishop Romero announced that he, as Archbishop, would attend no government function until the murders had been investigated.  In a Catholic culture where the presence of the Archbishop gave a legitimacy to the government, this act of separation was seen as a repudiation of the government’s moral legitimacy and a severe blow to its credibility.  It was an invitation to reject government authority.  The following day Romero published the following statement

The true reason for [Grande's] death was his prophetic and pastoral efforts to raise the consciousness of the people throughout his parish. Father Grande, without offending and forcing himself upon his flock in the practice of their religion, was only slowly forming a genuine community of faith, hope and love among them, he was making them aware of their dignity as individuals, of their basic rights as words, his was an effort toward comprehensive human development. This post-Vatican Council ecclesiastical effort is certainly not agreeable to everyone, because it awakens the consciousness of the people. It is work that disturbs many; and to end it, it was necessary to liquidate its proponent. In our case, Father Rutilio Grande.

As if this was not sufficient aggravation to the government, Archbishop Romero next cancelled all Masses throughout his Archdiocese, instead summoning the faithful to a single outdoor Mass in San Salvador.  150 priests and over 100,000 faithful attended.  
to be continued

An Example of Evangelical Catholicism in Practice

Jesuits at the Court

of Akbar the Great

in the late 16th 

century

There was a good homily at Mass yesterday morning for the feast of Saint Ignatius Loyola.  The priest, retired military chaplain and former missionary up on the Peruvian Altiplano—a man of some truly wonderful experiences—praised the Jesuits.  Turns out that he, like I, is a product of Jesuit schooling, though he went first cabin: Georgetown and Fordham. 

What he praised the Society of Jesus for is that they are not afraid to ask “Why?”  They are always willing to question.  This is rooted in the spiritual experience of Ignatius himself.  Ignatius had not been an easy convert: it took God’s Grace a lot of effort to reel him in and land him in the net of the saved.  And once in Peter’s barque, Ignatius was not afraid to question the tried and the true and do things in new ways.  For example, his “Companions of Jesus” were the first religious community to reject the “choral office”—choosing rather the somewhat revolutionary (at the time) idea that they should say their daily offices privately and individually rather than sing or chant the prayers liturgically in the church. Also  Ignatius didn’t mark a distinctive habit for the men of his new Society to wear.  Normally they dressed like secular priests.  But when there was need for them to adopt lay clothing—such as for their missions in Elizabethan England or persecuted 20^th century Mexico—they had no trouble doing so.  Jesuit missionaries to China first took on the robes of Buddhist monks and then, when they realized that this strategy hadn’t been the best to gain them access to the influence where they could make converts, they switched to the dress of mandarin scholars.  They also began saying Mass in Mandarin three and a half centuries before Vatican II put the Mass in the language of the people.  (Mandarin wasn’t the language of the ordinary Chinese, but of the scholars—similar to the Latin of 17^th century Europe.)    And yes the Church had “condemned” the thought of Copernicus and Galileo—but that didn’t stop Jesuit scholars such as Christopher Clavius or Wenceslaus Kirwitzer from their studies of the skies.  (Actually the list of Jesuit Astronomers in the 16^th and 17^th centuries is amazing and even today it is one of the most widely practiced sciences among Jesuits.)  There are always Jesuits thinking outside the box: they are seismologists, molecular biologists, computer scientists, ornithologists, mathematicians, paleontologists, botanists, and zoologists.  Jesuits are and have been musicians, philologists, natural historians, medical doctors, physicists, playwrights, poets, and lawyers.  Jesuits have served in the United States Congress and other parliamentary bodies, served as ambassadors, government ministers, university presidents, editors, and on governmental panels.  They have also taught high-school freshmen basic masculine hygiene, worked as chaplains in emergency rooms and hospitals, been missionaries under the most difficult circumstances and served as parish priests.  They have been confessors and spiritual directors to popes, kings, queens, and scullery maids.  There have been more than a few saints among them and, as in all groups, their share of sinners.  They have given their lives for the faith at the hands of Elizabethan Protestants, the North American Iroquois, Soviet Atheists, and U.S. sponsored militias in Latin America. They are truly the most phenomenal group of religious to have served the Church through our two millennia of spreading the Gospel.  Though there have been several communities of women religious who have modeled themselves on the Jesuits, the Society acknowledges no female branch, never has, and claims it never will.  Though I supposed they should be brave enough to ask themselves the question they ask everyone else in authority: “why?”

When we talk about evangelical Catholicism, the Jesuits exemplify the model.  They are men profoundly rooted in the Word of God.  From their first days in the novitiate Jesuits are formed in the Spiritual Exercise of Saint Ignatius Loyola—a thirty day retreat in which the new disciple is led through profound meditation to reflect on his own sinfulness, the life and teaching of Jesus, the sufferings of Jesus, and the Resurrection of Jesus and the impact that Resurrection is meant to have on our lives.  Those spiritual exercises not only give shape to the Jesuit’s own spirituality but his life and ministry for others.  The challenge is how to take this personal encounter of Christ, an encounter rooted in the Word of God, and make it the very blood that flows through our veins. 

One thing Jesuits—collectively—are not known for and that is quality liturgy.  (One of my favorite axioms is: “As confused as a Jesuit in Holy Week.”)  This is somewhat unfair, as some Jesuit establishments are known for the excellence of their liturgies.  I think of Holy Trinity Church in Georgetown DC, for example.  But by and large Jesuits tend to be a bit “low Church.”  Nevertheless, while the liturgy may not the most exciting, the sacramental life is intense.  Jesuit parishes: Holy Trinity in DC, Saint Ignatius or Saint Francis Xavier in New York, Saint Ignatius in Chicago, Saint Louis University Church in Saint Louis, Saint Ignatius or Saint Agnes in San Fran, The Gesu in Milwaukee, Saint Ignatius (they keep using that name) in Boston—are life-filled and lively centers of Catholic life and worship.  People come to these churches, they hear the word of God preached, they are welcomed into the community of the Church, and brought into a deeper life in Christ. 

I am obviously a super fan of the Society of Jesus and their contribution to the Church.  And delighted that we have a Jesuit Pope who is opening doors and windows and blowing the musty air out of the Church.  Ignatius’ motto was Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam—to the Greater Glory of God.  Well done good and faithful Jesuits!