The unofficial Jubilee Year guide to Rome

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

Every Sunday morning, Jews were compelled to go to Mass to listen to sermons exhorting them to convert to Christianity. Several small churches just outside the ghetto were used for that purpose. One still bears a plaque with a quotation from the prophet Isaiah in Hebrew and Latin: "I stretch out my hand to my people, and they take the wrong path." The quotation appears below a massive painting of Mary in sorrow at the feet of the crucified Christ, and the point is not lost on anyone. The image directly faces the synagogue.

The ghetto was notorious for both plague and floods when the Tiber River overflowed its banks. Sanitation was dreadful, and few civic services reached the area. Papal authorities actually taxed the Jews to pay for construction of the gates that closed them in.

Pope Pius IX flirted with liberating the Jews in 1846, but quickly recanted after the wave of revolutions that swept Europe in 1848. He said later of Jews that they are "dogs of whom there are too many present in Rome, howling and disturbing us everywhere." Full Jewish emancipation had to await the fall of the pope's temporal power in 1870 and the erection of a secular Italian republic.

Today, as Catholicism tries to feel its way toward a new understanding of the place of other world religions in salvation history, it is a useful act of historical memory to visit the ghetto, to recall what claims of theological supremacy once led to in this city.

Like the Campo, however, the spirit of the ghetto today is hardly morbid. There are a number of fantastic restaurants, most of them not kosher -- or more accurately, kosher moda italia. A friend tells a delightful story of visiting a kosher trattoria in the ghetto in search of a Jewish delicacy, a kind of beef made to look and taste like ham. The waiter informed him they were out and offered the real thing. "But I thought this restaurant was kosher," the friend said; the waiter responded, "We are ... Italian-style." It's a charming realization that the Italian Jews have developed the same gift for relativizing religious law as Italian Catholics.

The Piazza Bocca della Verita

This site is among the most popular tourist destinations because of a stone slab bearing the likeness of a river god built into the wall of St. Mary's in Cosmedin. Some say the slab once reposed on an altar of Jupiter, though most authorities believe it's actually an old storm drain. In any event, legend has it that if you tell a lie and then stick your hand in the god's mouth, it will clamp shut. Naturally enough, generations of Roman husbands and wives have brought their spouses here for tests of fidelity.

The Bocca della Verita is by the Palatino Bridge, near the ancient Circus Maximus, where more than 200,000 spectators crowded in to watch the chariot races.

The piazza, however, carries a more solemn memory for Roman Catholics, for it was on this spot that the final acts of capital punishment carried out under the authority of the pope took place. Given that John Paul II is today perhaps the world's foremost opponent of the death penalty, the piazza stands as a memorial to the progress Catholicism has made on the issue in a little more than a century -- and a salutary reminder of how long judicial murder was both endorsed and practiced by the Catholic magisterium.