Should we not banish from our minds the objections that still make us hesitant?
The first Jubilee was proclaimed by Pope Boniface VIII for the year 1300. The triumph was such that no one could have imagined it, and the influx of pilgrims far exceeded Rome’s reception capacity. Over two million pilgrims, and never less than two hundred thousand present at the same time in the Holy City. Considering the dangers to which pilgrims were then exposed, whether Roumieux (pilgrims to Rome) or Jacots (pilgrims to Compostela), should we not banish from our minds the objections that still make us hesitant? Indeed, in those days of Christianity, faith was so deeply rooted in the hearts of the faithful that the prospect of the graces promised by the Vicar of Christ overshadowed an overly human prudence.
1. Rome is a city loved by God
A very ancient tradition, which Pope Benedict XIV vouched for with all his authority as Pontiff, relates that in 38 B.C., in the early years of Augustus’ rule, a spring of oil gushed forth from the Roman soil, in the district situated across the Tiber, for an entire day. This prodigy heralded the coming of the Messiah during that Emperor’s reign and marked the consecration of Rome as a new holy city. Indeed, in the Old Testament, kings were consecrated with oil, and this custom has remained in the Church. The first Christians in Rome saw in the oil Our Lord Jesus Christ and in the spring the Blessed Virgin Mary, his Mother. The oil flowing on the soil of Rome heralded the conversion of the Empire.
Pope St. Callistus bought the Taberna Meritoria, a building located near the site of the miracle-a sort of hospital for veterans of the Roman army-and had a church built there dedicated to Our Lady of the Assumption: Santa Maria in Trastevere. Inside can be read this inscription:
“Here the oil gushed forth when God was born of the Virgin. By this oil, Rome is consecrated head of the two parts of the world. “
2. Rome is the new Jerusalem
“Certainly, Jerusalem is and always will be for Christians a great and incomparable memory; but Rome alone is for Christians a necessity. It is there that Christ fulfilled his promise to be with us until the consummation of the ages. It is there that his Cross, ever living, radiates on the West, the home of civilization, and on the rest of the universe to enlighten and enliven it. Ancient Zion preserves the monuments and traces of Christ’s sorrowful passion; but it is Rome, the new Jerusalem, that has become the reservoir of the redeeming blood; it is she who pours it out and distributes it to the whole world through all the channels of jurisdiction and priesthood. Jerusalem is our history, Rome is our life. “
– Cardinal Pie
The holy oil flowed out, signifying the consecration of the City. The veil of the Temple was torn, the altar stone was broken, marking the end of the Old Covenant, the heart of which was Jerusalem. From that moment, it is in Rome that life is found.
After the peace of the Church (313), St. Helena, mother of Emperor Constantine, found the true Cross (celebrated on Sept. 14). To guard this most precious relic, she had the Basilica of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem (328) built in place of her palace, located a few hundred meters from the Lateran in the imperial quarter. Along with the true Cross, he also had the finger of St. Thomas, which had touched Christ’s glorious wound, two thorns from the holy crown, a nail from the Crucifixion, and the Titulus, the inscription affixed to the Cross announcing in three languages the reason for the condemnation, ” Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. “
This church represents Jerusalem in the new holy city, and it is here that the Pope celebrates the Good Friday station, after the Stations of the Cross at the Colosseum.
3. Rome is consecrated by the blood of the Apostles
On June 29, 67, Apostles Peter and Paul, arrested together on Nero’s orders, were led out of the Mamertine Prison, where they had been imprisoned and where they had evangelized and baptized their captors. Peter was taken to Nero’s circus on the Vatican plain to be crucified. Paul, as a Roman citizen, was taken outside the city and was beheaded there. From the earliest times, Christians marked the burial places of the Apostles, and pilgrims from all over the Empire went there in prayer. During periods of relative peace in the first three centuries, oratories were built over their tombs. When the Church finally triumphed under Constantine, the Emperor had St. Peter’s Basilica built in the Vatican and St. Paul’s Outside the Walls on the Via Ostiense. Excavations initiated by Pius XII and conducted with extraordinary determination by Margherita Guarducci beginning in 1939 proved that Tradition was telling the truth. After years of meticulous work, the sacred remains of St. Peter were found in 1960, right under the high altar.
“Today’s feast, in addition to the respect that is paid to it throughout the land, must be for our City a cause for special veneration, accompanied by a special joy: so that, where the two principal Apostles died so gloriously, there may be, on the day of their martyrdom, an even greater outburst of gladness. For these, O Rome, are the two heroes who made the Gospel of Christ shine in your eyes; and it is they who made you, who were a teacher of error, a disciple of the truth. They are your fathers and your true shepherds, who, in order to introduce you into the heavenly kingdom, were able to establish you far better and with greater happiness for you than those who labored to lay the first foundations of your walls, and than he, from whom you took the name you bear, who stained you with the murder of his brother. It is these two Apostles who have raised thee to such a degree of glory, that thou hast become the holy nation, the chosen people, the priestly and royal city, and, thanks to the holy seat of blessed Peter, the capital of the world; so that the supremacy that comes to thee from divine religion extends far beyond what ever thy earthly dominion has gone. “
– St. Leo the Great, Sermon for the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul
In their footsteps, countless Christians spilled their blood, more than in any other region of the Empire, and that blood, referred to by Tertullian as “seed of Christians,” would become the fruitful source of a superabundant harvest.
4. Rome is the heart of the Church
Obeying the command given by Christ in the Gospel, “When they persecute you in one city, flee to another,” St. Peter was moving away from Rome, traveling along the Appian Way. Suddenly he was seized with astonishment: Christ appeared to him, carrying his Cross and advancing toward the city. “Where are you going, Lord? “ Peter asked, restless. “I am going to Rome, to be crucified a second time. “ The lesson was clear, and Peter turned around. Tradition marked the meeting place and a small oratory stands there today. It was necessary for it to be in Rome that the Prince of the Apostles fulfilled our Lord’s prophecy, ” When you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will gird your loins and lead you where you will not. “ (John 21:18)
And the evangelist adds, ” Jesus said this to indicate by what death Peter would glorify God. “
For more than sixty years (1305-1376), the popes had left Rome, torn by factions, to settle in Avignon. This exile had baleful consequences for the whole Church. The heart of the holy Church was in Rome, and Providence raised up a frail woman, the twenty-fifth daughter of a modest family of Siena, the Benincasa, to remedy this evil. God filled his servant with mystical favors, so much so that her fame, from Siena, spread throughout Tuscany, then throughout Italy and beyond its borders. Thus, this simple nun, marked by stigmata and enriched with the extraordinary gifts God had granted her, was able to accomplish the mission for which she had been called: to bring the Pope back to Rome.
“I want! “ he said with authority, and Gregory XI obeyed. Bringing the pope back to Rome and returning the Church to its true capital was the first indispensable step in the urgent reform of the Church that the pontiff intended to undertake. Providence willed that Catherine, the instrument of this return, should die in Rome in 1380 and be buried there. Today it is possible to venerate her in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. St. Ignatius of Loyola wished to depart with his companions to the distant lands of Asia to convert souls to Christ. But Pope Paul III ordered him to remain in Rome. “He who does good in Rome,” the Pope told him, “does good to all of Christendom. “
Similarly, St. Philip Neri had not come to Rome to stay, but the Holy Spirit was waiting for him. After selling all his books, Pippo Buono, as he was nicknamed, began a hermitic life, wandering from one basilica to another. Thus, he started a tradition that still endures today: the pilgrimage to the seven major basilicas. One night, while meditating in the catacombs of St. Sebastian, the Holy Spirit appeared to him in the form of a ball of fire and penetrated his heart. That heart, inflamed with love of God and neighbor, would spread that fire throughout Rome. Yet, tales of the wonders performed in the Indies aroused in Pippo the desire to reach out to St. Francis Xavier. He talked about it with a holy soul, the Carthusian monk Augustine Ghettini. After praying, the monk returned to Philip and told him, “St. John the Baptist revealed to me that, for you, the Indies are Rome.”
5. Rome is the land of Mary
On the Capitol stands a church called “Ara Caeli,” meaning the altar of heaven. “According to Tradition,” one reads inside on a marble band, “this place, called Ara Caeli, is built on the very spot where the Blessed Virgin Mary is believed to have appeared with her Son to the Emperor Augustus, all surrounded by a golden halo.” This apparition followed the investigation conducted by Augustus as to whether he could ascribe divine honors to himself. After consulting the Tiburtine Sibyl and fasting for three days, Augustus received a revelation from the Virgin that the place where she was standing was the Altar of the Son of God. Therefore he forbade that he be called “divus” and had an altar erected to the “Firstborn of God.”
The oldest church in honor of the Virgin Mary is the basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere. But the most important, in size, splendor and for the distinguished relics enshrined there, is undoubtedly Santa Maria Maggiore. The real name of this church is Santa Maria ad Nives, and its feast falls on August 5. As the Roman breviary lesson relates, the patrician John and his wife had prayed insistently to the Virgin to manifest to them how she wished them to consecrate their wealth. On the night of August 4-5, they both had the same dream. The next day they found the Esquiline Hill covered with snow. Pope Liberius had also had the same vision. Warned by John, he went with all his clergy to the snow-covered hill and marked the perimeter traced by the snow for the construction of the new church.
Basilica of St. Mary Major
In 590, as Gregory, who would later be called the Great, ascended the throne of Peter, the plague ravaged the Holy City. The pope ordered that Mary be invoked. Fasts and prayers were made, and the pope himself led a huge procession that started from St. Mary Major (or the Ara Caeli). The miraculous icon of the Virgin Mary, the “Salus Populi Romani,” which Tradition attributes to St. Luke, was carried. When the procession arrived on the banks of the Tiber, at the place where Castel Sant’Angelo stands today, the Archangel Michael appeared in the sky, surrounded by an innumerable multitude of angels. The leader of the heavenly militia, with a majestic gesture, placed his sword back in its scabbard, a sign that the prayer of the Church had been answered. The angels then sang the Regina Caeli hymn, for one was in the Easter season.
6. Rome is a land of saints
Sanctified by the blood of the Apostles, Rome is a fertile soil that has given the Church an impressive number of saints in every age. There is no street in the Holy City that does not hold some house, some oratory where a saint prayed, where Christ or the Virgin visited some privileged soul. Let’s take a short tour that might give you an inviting foretaste of a walk through the heart of the Holy City.
The pilgrim gets off the train at Termini and immediately can enter the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, built entirely by St. John Bosco, obeying the orders of Leo XIII. On the altar of the Virgin, a plaque commemorates the vision the saint had of the Virgin Mary, who revealed to him the meaning of the dream he had at the age of nine.
We then descend the slopes of the Esquiline Hill, crossing the Baths of Diocletian, built largely by Christian slaves. The basilica of St. Mary Major stands before us, with its majestic beauty. Besides the relics of the manger, it houses the remains of St. Jerome and St. Pius V, the pope of the Mass and of Lepanto. A few meters away, the basilica of St. Praxedes offers for our veneration the column of the scourging and the relics of more than three hundred martyrs, including the sisters Praxedes and Pudenziana.
Then descending via Urbana, we find the church of Santa Pudenziana, built on the Domus Pudentiana, where St. Peter stayed, and a little further down San Lorenzo in Carcere, the site of the imprisonment of Rome’s patron saint, and then reach Santa Maria ai Monti. On the steps of this church, on April 16, 1783, the 18th-century “poor man,” St. Benedict Joseph Labre, died of exhaustion.Continuing toward the Colosseum, we pass the Basilica of St. Peter in Chains, which preserves the chains that bound St. Peter both in Rome and Jerusalem.
Upon reaching the Colosseum, we remember the many Christians who shed their blood for Christ there, including St. Ignatius of Antioch, who was brought from Syria as a prominent prisoner to be fed to the lions. From here, we can continue along the Roman Forum to the church of St. Frances Romana or the Mamertine Prison, or pass the Colosseum and reach the church of St. Gregory the Great, where the holy pope founded a monastery, and then the Aventine Hill, where St. Dominic set up the general house of his order. In total, we covered about five kilometers in an hour’s walk, seeing wonders and receiving graces, praying all these saints in their footsteps and venerating their relics.
7. Rome is ours
Finally, Rome is ours because we are Catholics. “We worship with all our heart and soul Catholic Rome, the custodian of the faith and the traditions necessary for the maintenance of that faith, the eternal Rome, the teacher of wisdom and truth.”
Of course, the pilgrim attached to Tradition might feel some discomfort crossing the city streets, seeing puzzling modern ceremonies with grotesque chants and puerile clapping of hands. However, if you will allow me to give you my testimony, if there is one thing we are certain of when we visit Rome, it is that we are at home. Rome breathes Catholic Tradition. More than any other city in the world, Rome is forever marked by the history written by the Catholic Church, by the finger of God that designated it as the new Holy City, by the blood of the Apostles and Martyrs.
“How sad to see pilgrims in good faith praying at the tomb of John Paul II, the pope who applied the Second Vatican Council and excommunicated Monsignor Lefebvre and, with him, Catholic Tradition! But fear not: the day will come when these processions will cease, and the crowds will kneel on the other side of the basilica, praying at the tomb of St. Pius X.”
Let us therefore go to Rome, to pray to St. Peter, St. Paul and all the saints who make the eternal glory of this city, beseeching them to intercede with Our Lord Jesus Christ to raise up a pope after His own heart, who will restore the Church to its former glory.
Source: Le Seignadou – January 2025
