A Roman Christmas 1948

From The Cantuarian (Vol. December 1948 - July 1950)

Christmas, with all its universal significance for the Christian world, has become a national feast. Though the Message is the same, it has been taken and assimilated to the cultural life of peoples during nearly two thousand years, and now Christmas in a foreign land becomes hardly Christmas at all. What is it that divides the Northern from the Southern Christmas in Europe? Why does one feel more a stranger in Italy on Christmas Day than on any other day of the year? It is not merely a question of climate, for though there is brilliant sunshine by day, there are hard frosts by night. Even the fountains arc frozen, and log fires blaze from baroque fireplaces. 

These were questions which pre-occupied me as I entered the magnificent Renaissance Church of Santa Maria Maggiore at a few minutes before midnight on Christmas Eve. The entire Choir was a blaze of colour, with its scarlet hangings, its myriad candles, and the vivid reds and purples of the ecclesiastical robes. Only now could one really see the fifth century mosaics of the apse as they were meant to be seen, their gold blending with that of the magnificent fifteenth-century ceiling of the nave (the gold of which had been presented by Alexander VI from the first to be brought from America). The Church is one of the largest in Rome, yet by midnight it was almost full. I remembered that there were three hundred churches in Rome, and they would all be as full. Few could see the ceremonies proceeding behind the High Altar, but I could see by the faces of the great majority that they were following them with true reverence. Only here and there were the expressions merely indifferent or curious. Foreigners introduced a discordant note, especially when they spoke. I caught the voice of an Englishwoman behind me. "I prefer a service where the people can join in!" I remembered a famous Brains Trust voice saying that when he was on the Continent he found himself saying constantly "Thank God I'm an Englishman!”. I have been more often ashamed at the ill-bred ostentation or the insular ignorance of my fell ow-countrymen abroad. I now felt a wave of resentment against this foolish woman who thought that because the people were not bursting their lungs with revivalist hymns they were not "joining in". Could she not see the awe on the wrinkled faces of the aged and bowed crones around her? I slipped away. 

Next morning, in St. Peter's, I returned to the problem. High Mass was just beginning as I arrived. The sun streamed in through the high windows of Michelangelo's dome: in England it would have been a Spring day. Everywhere there was pleasant activity. Every chapel of the aisles had its little group of worshippers; there was a steady stream of people to kiss the toe of St. Peter, or to kneel before his tomb in the crypt below the High Altar. Only when it contained so many hundred people could the real size and purpose of St. Peter 's be appreciated. For a moment my attention strayed from the people to the monuments of art and history, from the pathos and purity of Michelangelo's Pieta to the stirring relief of John Sobieski's delivery of Vienna, and from the fine reproduction of Raphael 's Transfiguration to Canova's wistful monument to "James III" of England. The architectural problem of the High Altar is one that presents itself to every visitor, is this fantastic superstructure, ninety-five feet high, the last word in architectural incongruity, or is it, after all, the only intelligent solution to the problem with which Bernini was faced? But already the sounds of the Introit were to be heard at the main altar, and I hurried on to the altar rail in time to see the entry of the Pontifical guard in their impressive Napoleonic uniforms. They lined the way for the entry of the Cardinal, in his magnificent scarlet cloak and train. He took his seat .to the right of the altar, and the deacons began unrobing him, and dressing him in mitre and episcopal robes. The Preparation was complete, and the reading of the Lessons began. I was fascinated with the youth who stood before the Cardinal supporting (upon the tripod formed by his two hands and his head) the Great Book, from which the Lessons were read. A choirboy hurried from the altar, noisily banged the altar rail gate and hurried up the aisle, returning in a moment with the Cardinal's ceremonial sandals; only just in time, for the Lessons were ending, and in a moment the Cardinal would have to rise from his chair. The bell rang three times. The Cardinal was swinging incense. There was complete silence. "This is My Body…" The choir, unseen behind their latticed parapet, swelled forth Palestrina's Mass, perhaps with more enthusiasm than skill (for Church music in Italy is at a low ebb). The children seethed up to the altar rail, despite the "Scendere giu!" of the attendant, who, the order having been given, had fulfilled his duty, and made no attempt to enforce it.

How different it all was from services at that moment being held in the parish churches and cathedrals in England. Why had the Christian Churches become so divided? What is the difference in spirit between Latin and Teutonic Christianity? As I stood somewhat drowsed by the pleasant warmth of the sunshine, and by the incense, the answer seemed to me to be this. The essence of Teutonic religions has always been their mysticism; the mysticism which Tacitus and Caesar noted in the Germanic cults, and which found its supreme expression in the northern Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages. To the Teutonic peoples man lived and moved in a spirit world; flesh and spirit were sharply divided, and the darkness and mists of the northern climate hid a thousand terrors for him. But mysticism was entirely absent from the Graeco-Roman civilisation and its religions. Indeed their religions had been so much an everyday affair, and their gods so much family, tribal or communal possessions, that it is doubtful whether they had much real vitality. That was why Christianity so completely ousted them. But the "mental climate" remained. The household gods of the Romans disappeared, but the Roman attitude to the Virgin and the Saints was not so very different from the ancestral attitude to Vesta and the Lares. The Roman gods had been, so to speak, part of the family group, and in a very real sense the Virgin, her Son and the Saints became friends of the family. God, it is true, was remote and unapproachable, but the Virgin was there always as intercessor. The Church has always been the real centre of Italian life, for every member of the family spends at least a few minutes there each day in prayer, and the Virgin and Saints are always ready to listen to family troubles and misfortunes.

Thus customs, somewhat repulsive to Protestant ways of thought, have continued through the ages. The Italian will still place the name of a sick person at the shrine of the Virgin as the Etruscans did two-and-a-half millennia ago. In one of the churches of Venice there is a doll in a gaudy wedding-dress, symbolic of the wedding of the Virgin. To Northern eyes it is, at least, tawdry and tasteless, but to the Italian it is no more so than a wedding photograph so frequently displayed in Victorian households in this country. To the Italian the Church is the House of his Father in a sense more real than it had ever been in Teutonic countries. And so the beggar will sit at its door, the children will play in its portico, or in the nave itself, and young and old will live and die in the certainty of the infinite goodness and mercy of the Mother of God, and of the wisdom of the priest to guide them in all the problems of life. 

This being so, the wonder is not that the Reformation came, but that it did not come sooner. It was as inevitable as anything could be in human affairs. The tragedy was not that it came but that it came with so much rancour that the Teutonic and Latin Churches have remained ever since divided by barriers of partisanship and enmity, and each has been content to disseminate half-truths or downright false hoods about the other. One thing is certain. The two attitudes are poles apart. We who live in a country the face of which has been entirely changed during the last two centuries, can only look with wonder upon a civilisation which has changed so little since the twelfth century. In Italy. one lives constantly in the presence of the past. The names and doings of the Scaligeri, D 'Este Doria and Medici families are far better known and of more real concern to the Italian than are those of the Plantagenets, the Cecils and the Dudleys in England. And the centre of it all, so long as continuous history stretches back, has been the Church. Here, in St. Peter 's, more clearly than anywhere else, one could see how completely Western civilisation and Christianity were bound up with each other. Two thousand years of history formed a pattern, or back-cloth, against which the present became clearly intelligible. As the Mass came to an end, and the reading of the first verses of St. John’s Gospel began, I passed through the silent crowds, out into the sunshine. 

R.W.H

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