The unofficial Jubilee Year guide to Rome

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

What Garibaldi represents to Italians today are the core values of the nation his redshirts helped forge: democracy, equality before the law, free speech and a free press, and all the other civil and human rights associated with modern civil society. Italians also remember that the foremost opponents of the Risorgimento, and hence of these rights and freedoms, were the Catholic popes of the 19th century. These popes opted to defend the Papal States, a patchwork of territories in central Italy over which the pope ruled as a secular monarch, because they regarded the states as essential to safeguarding the church's independence.

Sometimes papal opposition to the Risorgimento went to ludicrous extremes. Gregory XVI (1831-1846), for example, refused to allow railroads in his domain, in part because he worried that a unified national rail network would lead to a unified nation. More often, the popes used the foremost weapons at their disposal, theological denunciation. Pius IX issued the "Syllabus of Errors" in 1864 attacking all the new concepts of civil rights. Among other things, he said that freedom of speech tends "more easily to corrupt the morals and minds of the people, and to propagate, the pest of indifferentism."

The pope's opposition to modern thinking was not merely theoretical. The French troops Pius IX summoned to defend the Papal States took the lives of more than a thousand Republicans, and hundreds of papal troops died in the final stages of fighting. A trip to the Garibaldi memorial hence reminds Catholics of lives once lost to resist principles that the church herself today espouses.

Day trips

If time permits a day trip outside Rome, here are two sites that can help restore one's spiritual optimism.

Assisi: The birthplace of St. Francis is something of a crossroads of the human spirit, since mystics and lovers of the earth from all walks of life are drawn here to celebrate the memory of Catholicism's most popular saint. This small medieval town in the Umbrian hills, like its native son, reflects all that is best about Catholicism -- its gracious, open spirit, its odd capacity to cultivate both extreme self-sacrifice and a jaunty love of life.

A few moments in prayer in the Porziuncula, the tiny chapel where Francis took solace, is often enough to recharge one's spiritual batteries, though to get the full effect one has to overlook the gaudy basilica constructed around it. That basilica, St. Mary of the Angels, now houses an unbelievably tacky display featuring wax models of Jesus, Mary and the Christ Child, with a waxen John Paul II, in full papal regalia, kneeling in front of them, and an altar boy standing nearby holding a censer. This flourish of papal-centrism strikes an odd note set against Francis' universal appeal.

Make sure not to miss the prints illustrating scenes from the life of St. Clare that line the entrance to St. Francis tomb. One shows the pope deep in prayer while Clare blesses eucharistic bread, a scene that looks for all the world like she's saying Mass.