Loitering in Pleasant Paths

by Marion Harland

“A filthy cur!” uttered Caput, and nobody said him nay.

Even the demon of malaria might scorn such prey.

We were told by those qualified by long residence in Italy to speak advisedly concerning these matters, that, while the priesthood of that country comprises many men eminent for learning, the mass of minor ecclesiastics, especially in the country, are ignorant and vulgar beyond our powers of credence. For ages, the monastic orders have been a swarm of caterpillars, battening upon the fat of the land, and blighting, while they devoured. To the King, who let the light into their nests, clearing out many, and leaving in the nest only those who were too infirm to begin a work, so unfamiliar to them all, as earning their livelihood—the thanks of civilization and philanthropy are due.

So harshly had our experiences in the church jarred upon the mood in which we had approached it, that we could not, as it were, get back to St. Paul that day. We deferred the pilgrimage to his supposed tomb until we were in better tune.

Tradition—“the elder sister of history”—asserts that as devout men carried Stephen to his burial, Paul’s friends and converts, including persons of influence in the city, even some attachés of the Imperial household, took charge of his remains. It is interesting to note the names of certain disciples, who were, we know, of that faithful band. Clement, of Rome, whose writings and whose Basilica remain with us unto the present day; Claudia, a British Princess, a Christian convert, and the protégée of an Emperor; Pudens, her husband, whose daughter and hers was the foundress of the primitive Cathedral of Rome.

This church—I digress to state—is now joined to a convent in Via Quatro Fontane. It occupies the site of the house of the daughters of Pudens—Prudentia and Praxedes. Or—what is more likely,—it was an enlargement of the family chapel—or “Basilica.” The repute of these sisters, the children of the noble pair who were Paul’s fellow-laborers, has descended to us by more trustworthy channels than those through which church-legends are generally transmitted. In the early persecutions their house was a refuge for the fugitive, a hospital for the wounded and dying,—a sacred morgue for bodies cast forth from torture-chamber and scaffold, to be eaten of dogs and crows. In one of the chapels of the old church is a mosaic of these sisters of mercy, pressing sponges soaked in martyrs’ blood into a golden urn. Another depicts them in the presence of their enthroned Lord, and, standing near, Paul and Peter. The women hold between them the martyr’s crown, earned for themselves by fidelity to the Faith and friends of their parents.

One of Paul’s disciples was a Roman matron named Lucina, who—to return to our tradition—gained possession of the Apostle’s lifeless body, and buried it in her own catacomb or vineyard in the vicinity of the Ostian Gate. Eusebius says the catacomb was shown in his day; Chrysostom, that “the grave of St. Paul is well known.”

“St. Cyprian”—writes Macduff—“is the interpreter, in a single sentence, of the sentiment of the faithful in those ages: ‘To the bodies of those who depart by the outlet of a glorious death, let a more zealous watchfulness be given.’ Can we believe that those who by means of rude sarcophagi and inscriptions in the vaults of the Catacombs, took such pains to mark the dormitory of their sainted dead, would omit rearing a befitting memorial in the case of their illustrious spiritual chief?”

From the same catacomb have been unearthed inscriptions belonging to the Pauline era. The story was so thoroughly believed in the reign of Constantine that he built the original Basilica of St. Paul’s above this catacomb, and placed the bones of Paul, or relics supposed to be his, within the crypt. Since that date, this church has had them in ward.

With these credentials fresh in our memories, we took advantage of a very mild morning whose influences somewhat tempered the chill of aisles and chapels, to make a prolonged examination of San Paolo-fuori-le-mura—St. Paul’s-beyond-the-Wall. The outside is, as I have intimated, tamely ugly. He who passes it by will remember it as the least comely of the hundred unsightly churches in and about the city. From the moment one enters the immense nave,—stands between the columns of yellowish alabaster, presented by Mehemet Ali, which are the prelude to a double rank of eighty monoliths of polished granite, cut from the Simplon,—to his exit, the spectacle is one of bewildering magnificence. Macduff likens the floor to a “sea of glass,” nor is the figure overstrained. The illusion is heightened by the reflection upon the highly-polished surface of the brilliant tints of the series of mosaic medallions, each the portrait of a pope, set in the upper part of the wall and girdling, in a sweep of splendor, nave and transept. The blending and shimmer of the gorgeous colors upon the marble mirror are like the tremulous motion of a lake just touched by the breeze. The costliest marbles, such as we are used to see wrought into small ornaments for the homes of the wealthy, are here employed with lavishness that makes tales of oriental luxury altogether credible, and the Arabian Nights plausible. Alabaster, malachite, rosso and verde-antique are wrought into columns and altars, and each chapel has its especial treasure of sculpture and painting. The pictures in the Chapel of St. Stephen, representing the trial and death of the martyr, would, by themselves, make the church noteworthy.