Italian Yesterdays, vol. 1

by Mrs. Hugh Fraser

And Constantine conquered. Maxentius, doomed, came out to meet him, and there was great slaughter, in which the upstart thief of the Purple died no honourable death, but was pushed off the bridge in the furious mêlée and choked in Tiber’s mud. And Constantine caused the Eagles to be replaced by the Cross on his standards, and entered in triumph to throw himself at the feet of Sylvester and, holding up his poor leprous[24] hands in piteous entreaty, to beg for health and baptism. Gladly and with great thanksgiving the Pope baptised him, and the water that washed away his sins cleansed his flesh, so that when he came up out of the sacred fountain there was no mark of leprosy on his body or of guilt upon his soul—“and the Church had peace.”

Constantine’s first thought was now to honour God by some splendid testimony of his gratitude, and, under the direction of Sylvester, he built the Basilica of the Holy Saviour, called also St. John’s before the Latin Gate. It was here that the evangelist suffered martyrdom in intention, was cruelly scourged, and plunged in boiling oil. God saved his life in order that he might write his sublime last book in the solitude of the Isle of Patmos, whither the persecutors exiled him after their attempts to slay him had failed; and to him, the beloved Virgin disciple, Constantine dedicated this, his first thank-offering, called ever since “the Mother of all the Churches in the World.”

After that came Constantine’s own mother, Saint Helena, to Rome, having, to her eternal glory, discovered the Saviour’s Cross in Jerusalem and desiring to bring a part of that sacred Tree to the centre of Christendom.

Standing on the green terrace at the southern end of Constantine’s Basilica, she saw a great empty space, beyond which, at the other end of the long decline that sinks away from it towards the southeast, there stood a half-ruined villa; there she resolved to raise the trophy of her own gratitude and to provide a fitting shrine for the inestimable treasure she had brought. But the Cross was still to rest on the soil that Jesus had trod. She caused a shipload of earth to be brought from Jerusalem, and on this the foundations of the Basilica of the Holy Cross were laid, contiguous to a palace which was her chosen dwelling during her sojourn in Rome. The Basilica, so frequently rebuilt and restored that probably no part of the exterior would now be recognised by the pious Empress, is dark and bare, but symmetrical in outline and possessing a severe dignity of its own. It presents a marked contrast to the florid yet noble southern portico of St. John Lateran, and the long green avenue, shaded by double rows of mulberry trees, which used to connect the two, seemed to lead the spirit by fitting degrees from the splendid stability of Catholic worship to-day to the sterner conditions of that long-vanished past.

Until the Papacy transferred its seat to Avignon, the green plain between Helena’s Basilica and the Lateran was, once a year, the scene of a beautiful and mystical ceremony. On the Fourth Sunday in Lent, when the Church, to encourage her children in their forty days’ career of penance, replaces her sombre vestments by those of crimson and gold reserved for great feasts, when the organ, dumb since Ash Wednesday, once more fills the cathedrals with joyous music, when the Mass begins with the command to rejoice—then the Pope, accompanied by the Cardinals, went to the “Mother of all the Churches,” St. John Lateran, and there, with a prayer of wonderful beauty, blessed and sanctified the “Golden Rose.” The rose being the emblem of Divine love, shedding around the sweet fragrance of charity, often found a place in the ceremonial of the Church. For this particular occasion a cunning jeweller fashioned a flower in pure gold, blossom and leaf and stem, and the Pontiff prayed to the Creator of all beautiful things, who was Himself the true Joy and Hope of His children, to bless the flower carried as a sign of spiritual joy, in order that the faithful, contemplating it, might raise their hearts to the heavenly Jerusalem, and persevere in the sweet odour of good works until they should be eternally united to Him who is the flower come forth from the branch of Jesse, who called Himself the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley; and that, in the company of all the blessed, they might glorify forever the Divine Flower who shall reign in Heaven eternally.

When the prayers were over, the Pope came forth from the Lateran, wearing the mitre and holding the Golden Rose in his hand; mounting his white palfrey, and accompanied by the whole Pontifical Court, he rode down the green way to the Basilica of the Holy Cross. There he preached a sermon on the virtues symbolised by the rose (there is still one of these sermons extant, delivered by Innocent III) and then celebrated Holy Mass. When that was over, he returned on horseback, still holding the Golden Rose and followed by the whole gorgeous cavalcade to St. John Lateran, where, if some royal prince happened to be present, his was the honour of assisting the Holy Father to dismount, and he received, in reward for his filial piety, the Golden Rose from the Pope’s own hands.

In our days the ceremony of blessing the Rose takes place in a hall of the Vatican, and the Holy Father sends it as a gift usually to some Catholic princess—I remember that a few years ago he sent one to our little English Queen of Spain. I heard of another, and a very touching, present sent by Leo XIII to a royal lady who was awaiting the birth of her child—the baby’s entire layette, marvels of beauty worked by the nuns, and all blessed by the Holy Father for the small Christian who was to wear the garments!

After founding the Church of St. John Lateran, the zeal of Constantine led him to build another and greater one over the tomb of St. Peter. For this the tomb itself served as a nucleus, and Constantine would have no hands but his own dig the beginning of the foundations. “Laying aside the chlamys” (the mantle on which were embroidered the insignia of his rank) “he opened the earth for the construction of the Basilica. Then he carried away on his own shoulders twelve basketfuls of earth, in honour of the twelve Apostles.” The work thus inaugurated was continued under his direction. The body of the blessed Apostle was at this time brought back from the Catacombs to its original resting-place with great glory, and encased in a magnificent silver coffin which in its turn was placed inside a sarcophagus of gilt bronze. Constantine forbade any but the priests to touch the sarcophagus, under pain of severe punishment. At one point on the way, the bearers seemed to be wavering a little, and a common workman, forgetting the Emperor’s orders, stretched out his hand to steady it. There was no need for Constantine to punish him, for the poor fellow’s hand shrivelled up at the contact, only to be restored after earnest prayers for forgiveness of this irreverence.

The incident may be legendary, but it reminds me of a later and more authentic one connected with the obelisk which stands in the centre of the Piazza of St. Peter’s. This huge monolith of red granite was brought by Caligula from Heliopolis—the scene of General Kléber’s victory and violent death on the 14th of June, 1800, while Marengo was being fought and won. Its arrival caused great excitement in the imperial city and crowds went out to see it as it lay at Ostia in a ship built on purpose to carry it and, as Pliny informs us, “almost as long as the left side of the port of Ostia.” Unlike most of the Egyptian obelisks, it bears no inscriptions of any kind on its polished sides. It first stood in the Circus of Nero, on ground now covered by the Sacristy of St. Peter’s, and it was only under Sixtus V, in 1586, that it was placed in its present position. Its enormous size and weight (about three hundred and twenty tons) made the moving and erection a labour of the greatest difficulty. The work was superintended by Fontana, the eminent architect, who employed eight hundred men and one hundred and fifty horses to drag it the short distance to the centre of the Piazza. Then came the raising and placing on the pedestal prepared for it, a task so delicate and anxious that Sixtus forbade any one, under pain of death, to utter a single word during the process. Slowly and unwillingly the huge thing submitted to be raised from the ground, but, before it had reached the perpendicular, that happened which the architect had not foreseen—the enormous cables began to stretch. The strain dragged on them so fearfully that in a few minutes they must have parted—and the obelisk would have thundered to the ground; but a brave sailor man, casting self-preservation to the winds, shouted, “Water on the ropes.” Instantly he was obeyed; a thousand hands sent the buckets flying along, the cables were drenched, and they held till the giant rose obediently in air and settled squarely on its base. The grateful Pope sent for the brave sailor and asked his name and birthplace. “Bresca of Bordighera,” was the answer. What he gave to Bresca, the chronicler has left to our imagination—probably enough to keep him in fat comfort to the end of his days; but to Bordighera, that garden of the Mediterranean shore, he gave the privilege of furnishing forever the palms used in the Church on Palm Sunday; and down to 1870 there came, every year, a ship to the mouth of the Tiber, full to the gunwale with the Bordighera palm branches, which the nuns of Sant’ Antonio wove and plaited into a thousand fanciful shapes, for use in the Palm Sunday procession at St. Peter’s.

There is a touching story connected with the Piazza of St. Peter’s. Twenty years or so before Sixtus V became Pope, the sainted Pius V was reigning Pontiff (1566-1572). He had a great devotion to the blessed martyrs—I remember possessing a little terra-cotta lamp ornamented with Christian emblems, found in the Catacombs, which he had taken in his hands and blessed for some pious soul. He often had to traverse the great Piazza in going and coming from the Vatican, and he never did so without thinking of all the brave Christian blood that had been shed there in the early times. One day he was walking across the Piazza deep in conversation with the Ambassador of the King of Poland, when suddenly he paused, remembering the soil on which they stood. The place was unpaved then, and the Pope, stooping down, took up a handful of earth which he gave to the Ambassador, saying: “Keep this dust, for it is composed of the ashes of the saints and steeped in the blood of the martyrs.”