The unofficial Jubilee Year guide to Rome

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 20, 2000 by John L. Jr. Allen

Off the beaten path, Catholic Christianity, warts and all

By the stroke of midnight on Dec. 31, 2000, some 25 to 40 million extra visitors will have descended upon Rome to take part in the Catholic church's Jubilee Year. Most will have followed the standard pilgrim's tour: the catacombs, the Vatican museums, a papal audience on Wednesday, or his appearance for the Angelus on Sunday, and above all trips to the four great basilicas: St. Peter, St. Mary Major, St. John Lateran, and St. Paul Outside the Walls.

The journey to these soaring structures is time well spent. Each is a masterpiece; Christianity must have done something right over the centuries to elicit such beauty, such passion, from its artists and architects.

The pilgrim feels a spiritual kinship walking through these holy doors to receive the Jubilee indulgence, or forgiveness of sin, knowing this simple act binds one with ancestors in faith who once crossed the same thresholds, seeking the same taste of divine compassion. The experience gives flesh to the Catholic notion of a "communion of saints."

Yet the discerning pilgrim will eventually feel something else, too, a nagging sense that the story of Rome, and hence the story of Roman Catholicism, cannot be understood simply from visiting the spots on the prescribed Vatican itinerary. These basilicas -- above all, St. Peter's -- are not just monuments to Christianity, but also to the Roman Catholic papacy. They were constructed in part to make the Roman pontiff seem larger than life, heaven-sent and invincible, just as the temples and palaces of ancient Rome were meant to exalt the emperor. That ideological component still pulsates in the cool marble and gold overlay of these magnificent edifices.

Like any human institution, Catholicism's story is not simply one of heroism and piety, and Rome, as its nerve center for 2,000 years, reflects this ambiguity. The city has incubated tremendous good, but it has also seen venality and occasionally spectacular cruelty in the name of Christ. Indeed, close-up exposure to Rome has threatened the spiritual health of many a believer. Rome is such a spiritual city, the old saying goes, because so many people have lost their faith here.

A thorough pilgrimage, one that immerses the visitor in church tradition "warts and all," must therefore resemble one of those paintings by Caravaggio scattered across Rome -- it must be an interplay of light and shadow.

Putting together such a tour will never be the mission of the Vatican's pilgrimage office, and travelers will not find maps and guides in the shops that ring St. Peter's Square. But an independent-minded pilgrim, willing to follow not just one but several roads less traveled, will be able to leave Rome both inspired by the greatness of Catholicism and sobered by its perennial temptation to do harm precisely in the name of that greatness.

The following four sites should be on the list of such a "critical pilgrimage." For pilgrims looking to sneak out of the city for a day, two additional suggestions follow.

Monument to Bruno in the Campo De'Fiori

Giordano Bruno, Dominican, philosopher, and -- in the eyes of the Inquisition -- heretic, was burned at the stake in Rome's Campo De'Fiori Feb. 17, 1600, allegedly with a nail driven through his tongue so he could not repeat his heterodoxies while the flames lapped around him. Today a monument to Bruno stands in the very spot he was killed, put up in the 19th century by Italian republicans and anti-clericals who came to look upon him as a hero.

The Campo De'Fiori is in the heart of the historic center of Rome, just off the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele.

Bruno, easily one of the most intriguing figures in church history, joined the Dominicans in 1565, but was forced to flee the order in 1576 because of suspicions about his increasingly novel beliefs tending toward pantheism. (He was also accused of murdering a fellow Dominican whose body was found in the Tiber River, but this was never the basis of any action against him.) He moved from place to place across Europe under constant suspicion until he was arrested by officers of the Inquisition in Venice in 1592. He spent the next seven years in Rome in the prison of the Holy Office until, refusing to recant his ideas, he was condemned. His words upon hearing the verdict were meant for posterity: "Perhaps you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it."

The popular assumption is that Bruno was killed because he accepted the Copernican theory that the earth moves around the sun, and indeed this was part of the story. Yet Bruno was not really a scientist; at heart, he was a theologian and an alchemist, and for him the new scientific theories were part of a grander picture involving the rejection of Aristotle and the resurrection of ancient Egyptian solar worship. He denied the doctrine of the Trinity, arguing that the existence of more than one divine person would compromise God's perfection. He embraced mystical Arab philosophies, theorized about the existence of extraterrestrial life and at one point speculated that Moses and Jesus may have been talented magicians rather than divine messengers.