Faith, Lasagna, and the Places We Find Ourselves

“Did you see the beautiful Santa Maria Maddalena?” Roberto, our server, asked as we were looking over the menu. “It ‘ees’ built in the 18th century and the head chiesa of the Camillians order,” he added in his lovely Italian accent. Standing up and moving around our table to get a look, I realized that I had not even noticed it as we entered the little Piazza della Maddalena. Just a few blocks from the famous Pantheon and steps from innumerable holy sites, beautiful churches, and endless elements of Roman history, the Church of St. Mary Magdalene had been invisible to me as we were looking for the restaurant.

Just moments before, we had been in the Palm Sunday procession led by Catholic priests of the Dominican Order, at Santa Maria Sopra Minerva (St. Mary Over Minerva). Moving through the back halls of the Basilica, we gathered in the courtyard with about a hundred fellow Catholics to begin Holy Week with the Palm Sunday re-enactment of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem at the beginning of His Passion. The service was in Italian, which only added to the beautiful mystery of the experience as we grabbed olive branches and processed down corridors and into the the piazza before hundreds of curious tourists with cameras and fascination.

Kneeling within the massive Basilica, its facade facing the back corner of the Pantheon a few steps away, and the tomb of St. Catherine of Siena under the altar before me, I listened intently for recognizable words from the service. The choir was lead by a lady whose voice was stunningly beautiful, and the chorus soared into the vaulted ceiling, 100+ feet above, like a prayer landing amid the deep blue with gold stars. My lack of understanding of the language detracted little from my understanding of the story nor from my joy in receiving the moment in a way that is impossible when the mind is busy about the words.

Earlier in the day, we stood upon the ruins of the Roman Forum, right above what was known as Mamertine prison, the place where St. Peter and St. Paul were imprisoned before being put to death for their faith. As our guide was telling us about the funeral pyre of Julius Caesar and the reverence Romans still hold for him, my mind went to his betrayers, and Dante. in his Inferno, Dante depicts Satan as a mindless beast, stuck in ice at the bottom of hell, three-faced, with each mouth gnawing on one of the three most notorious betrayers in history: Brutus and Cassius who betrayed Julius Caesar, and Judas the Iscariot, the betrayer of Jesus Christ.

Tour guides in Rome often describe the city as a lasagna, built up in layers one upon another over thousands of years. The ruins of ancient Rome on which we stood had only been rediscovered in the last couple of hundred years and are still being excavated, making it hard to imagine how hundreds of feet of buildings get buried in time as new things are built upon them. Standing within the remnants of Augustus Caesar’s 500,000 square foot palace, looking down upon the Forum and the Colosseum, it is hard not to get lost in the ocean of time and events that layer the deep lasagna on which our modern world is built.

Moving down from atop Palatine Hill, we passed the Arch of Titus, built to commemorate and tell the story of Titus’ quashing of the Jewish rebellion in 70AD. The sculpted panels around the arch depict scenes from the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Jewish temple. As we walked past the ruins of the Basilica of Maxentius and stood before the Arch of Constantine, standing just outside the Colosseum, we advanced 300 hundred years from the fall of Jerusalem and the point of connection to my Palm Sunday experience at Santa Maria Sopra Minerva.

The Arch of Constantine depicts his victory over his brother-in-law, Maxentius, at the Milvian Bridge in 312 AD, a victory he attributed to his adoption of the symbol of the cross on the shields of his solders after he received a vision that by this sign he would conquer. One version of the story was a vision of the cross in the sky before the battle and another version was that it came to him in a dream. Regardless, he defeated Maxentius to become the Emperor of the Western and Eastern Roman Empire and a year later, legalized Christianity across the Roman Empire.

Lasagna. So many layers. In a few minutes, we’ll leave to walk over to St. Peter’s Square to celebrate Palm Sunday Mass with Pope Leo XIV and 60,000 fellow Catholics. What a place we find ourselves. There is an impossible beauty to the layers of the last 2000 years of history and the heritage of faith that we call Catholicism. Throughout the layers, man’s imperfections loom large, and yet, the Universal Church still stands, calling all of us to holiness. The great deposit of faith revealed to us through Scripture and Tradition remains. Timeless and timely.