Roman Jubilee

...The Scripture readings were recited in six languages, in alternation this time so as not to try people's patience or run over the airwave schedule...

...People talked, shifted around, shoved others who were trying to say their beads...

...The Holy Week and Easter ceremonies of 1974 provided a good preview of the phenomena that will occur during the current Holy Year...

...it was over...

...One of the same doctors now advertises on the whole back cover of the telephone book, mentioning only varicose veins, and there is more urine on walls...

...than proportionately in other countries-feel the tradition itself has been outlived and should be dropped...

...the press had different accounts of what else they were, orphans, retarded or polio cases, the last version absurd since they all walked in...

...The old raison d'etre of the pilgrimage, the earning of indulgences, has now gone from shadowy to nil...

...One side chapel in every church in the city was beautifully adorned with flowers and candles that Friday, and the few quiet visitors kneeling before the altar at any given time lent an air of devotion, even worship-enlightened or benighted according to the eye of the onlooker, but to themselves for a while less foolish in the face of death...

...Indeed, anyone who remembers Rome in 1950 is likely to think of the last jubilee as ancient history, so much has happened to public and private attitudes in the interval...

...The relevance, which is there, did not come across, and the record was stuck...

...On such as these, Jesus looked with love and charity, we are told...

...The first night Pope John slept in the room he said, "When you sleep you sleep with the light off," and had the shutters pulled down...

...It was too late for another show that night...

...The dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin, the canonization of little Maria Goretti, seem not 25 but 250 years in the past...

...Peter's Basilica on Christmas Eve, the presence of television cameras and the receipt of bomb threats underscored the changing times...

...The absence of youth somehow grew by the minute, into a positive force of deadliness...

...There, as the rest of the world observed on television, the service was held outdoors, with altar, choir and notables on the top landing...

...A dozen of the nuns, of no vocal accomplishment, moved into a huddle and served as choir when the time came, more pathetic for the contrast with the triumph of art (along with that of Christ) on the 9th-century mosaic arch over their heads...

...It shades into number two: the conflict at the upper echelons of the Vatican itself over its post-Council role, as a power structure in the old sense, or as a guide and stimulus to individual conscience, with ecumenism a cross-current on its own...

...As the Holy Year would be just another year...

...It seemed that Christ would not bother to rise from the tomb among such doldrums...

...In spite of torrential rain the basilica was pretty much jammed...

...That the 12 boys were poor seemed to be agreed or assumed...

...A small newspaper notice stated that Pergolesi's Stabat Mater would be sung at San Marcello on the Corso on Good Friday afternoon, but it was a mistake...

...The president explained the name was chosen because of the popularity of the Jesus movement...

...None of the old cries of "Viva il Papa...

...It is nice to feel friendly with mankind far away when not all samples close by are at their best...

...In fact, it was a surprise to learn that the whole performance had taken place by the temple where most of the cameras and sound apparatus were set up...

...The whole idea of expediency is under attack for being an anachronism from the era of the Papal States that now works against the needs both of humanity and of the Church itself...

...That crisis-of which arguments over celibacy, birth control, papal infallibility, monastic and clerical dress, and the serious drop in numbers of candidates for the priesthood (notably in France and Italy) are only among the better-known symptoms-is consideration number one...

...it was as if the clergy in charge, having risen through layer after layer of hierarchy, were conscious that they had lost their grip...

...Instead of watching from home, the crowd was watched milling about in the square, when not applauding or crossing itself, though there was not much of that...

...Such ideas were not seditious during the brief years of Papa Giovanni's vicarage, 1958-63, and some, by no means all, who hold them were his devotees and are accordingly critical of both Paul VI and Pius XII...

...A good many of the people drifting away looked as most probably did when the best lion failed to eat anybody...

...It was difficult or impossible to find out where certain services would be held, or where, for instance, there might be good music in a cathedral, in case one should want to contemplate the meaning of the week in that way...

...Heart, A Novella, and Other Stories, and later this month Pantheon will also publish an updated edition of her Rome and a Villa, from which this piece is adapted...

...Pope John and Vatican Council II utterly changed the nature of the occasion...

...There is a loss of faith, in the ranks as out, but there are also defenders of faith, speaking a new kind of language, advocating new methods, and more than that, new concerns, whether or not tinged with Marxism or what passes for such...

...For that matter, many high-as well as low-ranking members of the clergy-albeit probably fewer in the U.S...

...One was aware that the feet had undoubtedly been well washed beforehand, yet that should not matter, for the symbolic act can be more powerful than any realism...

...As for the craving, apparently on the increase, for mass togetherness-evidenced by rock festivals, guru gatherings, Protestant sect revivals, and the like-Rome will of course offer some satisfaction...

...Not that parochial efforts aren't often the most affecting, when they are the best that can be done, but for the Church in Rome with its vast treasure and other resources to permit such a poorhouse performance in one of its truly venerable churches, indeed in most, was peculiar...

...The lights dimmed...

...Actually, many special buses had come in from outlying towns and there were probably as many Italians as foreigners present...

...As one intellectual Italian Monsignor puts it, 1950 was the last Holy Year of the Counter-Reformation...

...And at the end of his short homily from the upstairs balcony, the Pope said Happy Easter in about 20 languages, including Vietnamese, a touching gesture...

...The same mood could be felt, against all odds, at the Colosseum...

...Easter would be just another Sunday otherwise...

...The setting was stupendous in the white superlighting-the Colosseum to one side, the huge columns of the Temple of Venus and Rome on top of the steep rise to the other-and the studying was marvelous...

...This, a subdivision of the general question of the meaning of a pilgrimage to Rome in the present age, bears on the speculation about the Holy Year being perhaps outmoded...

...On Good Friday the Pope presided at the ritual of the Stations of the Cross, outside the Colosseum...

...Consideration number three is what the experience will add up to for the television-nurtured, spectacle-surfeited mind of the modern world...

...The model was a 23-year-old American named Donna Jordan...

...It is the ecclesiastical side of the 1975 Holy Year that is going to make it the most different in some vital respects, for all its superficial resemblances to previous ones...

...one had supposed that it was going on at the main ground level...

...Once more the Catholic world is invited to look toward Rome, if not go there, for the great jubilee observances that began, in rather grass-roots fashion, in 1300, and settled into their quarter-century timetable in 1475...

...And since most of the spiritual benefits depend on special programs and efforts by parish priests all over the Catholic world, undertaken weeks or months in advance, they partake of every shading and degree, split and faction, defense and attack making up the present crisis in the Church...

...The priest droned on and on, in Italian not Latin-that daring concession to the times-about the crossing of the Red Sea...

...Nuns from the adjoining convent made up half the sparse congregation, and there was no one in the other half under 50...

...One American, foul-smelling and filthy in mane and beard, was slumped on the cobblestones against a fountain basin, stoned, his back to the altar and fly open, and there were others not far from that state...

...But whether it should be counted in the category of virtue is debatable...

...There is no sign that the doings throughout 1975 will draw many but the middle-aged and up from anywhere in the world...

...It had been something to do, someplace to go...

...there appeared to be no way of shaking off the Egyptians "e i loro cavalli e i loro cavalieri...

...The papers reported the next day that the Pope himself had carried the cross for the last four stations, but this could not be seen by the majority of the vast public...

...On its face a strange place to observe the Stations of the Cross, it was co-opted for the purpose some generations back, as an antidote to the bawdy ones it served historically, and on the reasoning that some of the martyrs to mobs and lions must have been Christians...

...The voices over the loudspeakers were well amplified and respectful, announcing in six languages: "Jesus falls the first time Jesus tombe pour la premiere fois...

...After 1475 there was no break for three centuries, and the celebration of 1775 was such a success, Voltaire remarked that another like it would finish philosophy forever...

...Yet despite Vietnam, the past quarter-century has been more peaceful than most over the span of the event, if more speeded-up and marked by deeper human convolutions perhaps than any...

...It featured a picture of a light shining at night in the Pope's bedroom window over St...

...Peter's...

...there was no choir or organ, only a sprinkling of old people who squeaked out something else about Mary in her grief...

...When Pope Paul VI signaled the start of the new Holy Year by presiding over the lowering of the Holy Door of St...

...Only a few intellectuals strayed in before the service to admire the beautifully illuminated mosaics of the S. Zeno chapel, considered the most important Byzantine monument in Rome...

...Eager for spiritual acts, not words, they tell about a Vatican postage stamp issued a little before Pius XII's death...

...Three square-looking American teenagers, nothing like hippie types, giggled and chattered all through, under the smiling approbation of their well-heeled parents, who seemed overjoyed that the kids were not sulking for once...

...Loud protests were heard from, among others, the small Italian Women's Lib group, which said the ad exploited women, but the company's sales had quadrupled...

...This highlife version of the skidrow ending added a seedy footnote to a seedier chapter of history...

...Thus it must have been something in the atmosphere that made the reenactment of Jesus' humbling himself before the poor on that last tragic day far less effective than it is in the book...

...For anything else, publicity was lacking...

...In fact, he scuttled in, rapidly, either in humility or as a security measure, and proceeded to intone part of the mass in a somewhat wavering voice and to wash the feet of 12 boys clothed in white robes...

...While on the subject of prudery, it should be noted that Rome's urinals-elegantly known as vespasiani after the emperor who instituted them-have for some reason been removed, along with the doctors' ads for venereal disease treatment that used to appear on them...

...It showed a girl's sexy rear from waist to knees, the lower half bulging lusciously below a pair of denim briefs, as brief as they could be and still go under the crotch...

...Eleanor Clark is the author of Dr...

...Christ was crucified...

...Last Easter thousands of foreign students were in Rome on vacation, and they went to the big shows...

...Any such danger at present would scarcely be from that cause...

...But it failed...

...The grandson of Mussolini, he was reported to have said the Duce was right to execute Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano-his son-in-law and this man's father-shortly before getting bumped off and strung up himself by the partisans in the north at the end of World War II...

...A key difference, however, will be the age level of those present-once participants, now with few exceptions merely spectators...

...There have been few interruptions: Though in the 19th century political upheavals kept all but the 1825 Holy Year from being held, that was exceptional...

...When the same scenes or at least their highlights can be watched from home, there may still be reasons for flying to the spot, yet scarcely the same ones as in 1950, already a far cry from walking to it...

...A few in the crowd clearly wished to be dipped once again in the comprehension of suffering that is basic to Christianity, in contrast to some Eastern religions, and which after all is not a bad thing, however you come by it...

...After the fine beginning, a dead weight fell...

...The church of S. Prassede -built in 822, on much earlier foundations, and somewhat impurified by subsequent construction-was three-quarters empty on Holy Saturday night, one of its rare occasions of functioning splendor in the year...

...The old guard at the Curia has a double antagonist, and must be hard put to decide which part is more dangerous...

...On the evening of Good Friday an alcoholic wastrel named Marzio Ciano died at the age of 37...

...were heard, perhaps partly because too many in the crowd were foreigners and a million cars had left Rome...

...Certainly, under modern conditions, the notion of anybody's coming to true repentance from the trip seems far-fetched, though there are always exceptions...

...Peter's Square, and carried a legend to the effect that the room's occupant never stopped watching over his flock...

...Evidently Pergolesi was not sung live anywhere in Rome that day, nor were any of Stravinsky's religious works performed during the week, ecumenism notwithstanding...

...This has all been general knowledge for years, although as the writings of the late Cardinal Danielou among others show, the issues are a great deal more complicated than they seem and general knowledge can be nine parts general error...

...Up front by the cordon where the Pope passed coming and going, there seemed a fair chance of being crushed to death, chiefly by Germans...

...On Maunday Thursday afternoon, dressed in fairly simple white evangelical garb, he was not carried into San Giovanni in Laterano, he entered it by a side door on foot...

...The caption was close enough to Christ's exhortation, whether in our Bible or the Vulgate, to be taken for it: "Chi mi ama mi segua-He who loves me, let him follow me...

...Last spring the Pope was in poor health and had to back out of a few functions, but he went through with the most significant ceremonies-that is, the biggest and most spectacular-observing the key points in the story of Christ's agony and resurrection, as recorded in the New Testament...

...As with all his appearances, the fact was announced by flyers pasted on walls everywhere...

...The candle-lighting ceremony out in the courtyard, the return to the darkened church, the smile of the busy old woman providing everyone with a candle and making sure each was properly lit, seemed to promise the only truly moving event of the week...

...A university chorus gave a good Palestrina concert in the auditorium of a handsome new school, yet only because the university was too riddled with conflict to have it there...

...Still, particular emphases would be hard to mistake-for example, harsh criticisms of the Vatican's money practices, as in connection with the Italian building boom, and of its failure to denounce certain political atrocities...

...Gesu...

...Easter dawned nevertheless, the rain held off through the morning, and hundreds of buses had their route numbers changed to the one for St...

...Meanwhile, on walls all around the city, and the rest of the country too, there was displayed a large poster advertising a make of blue jeans called Jesus Jeans...

...Nobody seemed overcome with enthusiasm, or particularly let down either...