[8] In July of this year, 1903, while the Roman Catholic world was greatly exercised over the grave illness of the late Pope, Leo XIII., the Associated Press dispatches from Naples reported that the blood of St. Januarius had miraculously liquefied at that unusual time in token that the prayers offered for the Pope's recovery had been answered. The Archbishop of Naples has up to the present time vouchsafed no explanation of the fact that the Pope died a few days later, notwithstanding this miraculous assurance that he would recover.
CHAPTER XXX.
Roman Catholic Relics at Rome.
We reached Rome at a good time for seeing relics, as the special services of the Christmas season were just beginning. One of the most splendid of these ceremonies is the procession in honor of the Santa Culla; that is, the cradle in which the priestly tradition says the infant Jesus was carried into Egypt. This is the great relic and chief distinction of the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, though it contains a number of others, such as the bodies of St. Matthew and St. Jerome, and two little bags of the brains of Thomas á Becket, and "one of the pictures attributed to St. Luke (and announced to be such in a papal bull attached to the walls!), much revered for the belief that it stayed the plague which decimated the city during the reign of Pelagius II., and that (after its intercession had been sought by a procession by order of Innocent VIII.) it brought about the overthrow of the Moorish dominion in Spain."
The Miraculous Snow in Summertime.
Moreover, this church of Santa Maria Maggiore is by no means lacking in legendary and architectural interest. It was founded A. D. 352, by Pope Liberius and John, a Roman patrician, to commemorate an alleged miraculous fall of snow, which covered this spot of ground and no other, on the 5th of August, and an alleged appearance of the Virgin Mary, in a vision, at the same time, showing them that she had thus appropriated the site of a new temple, all of which is duly represented in a fine painting on the wall of the church, and in two of Murillo's most beautiful pictures in the Academy at Madrid, and commemorated every year on the 5th of August by a solemn high mass, and by showers of white rose leaves thrown down constantly through two holes in the ceiling, "like a leafy mist between the priests and the worshippers."
A Splendid Church.
The worshippers of the Virgin have not been lacking in their efforts to erect a suitably sumptuous building on the site of this "miracle." The magnificent nave, with its avenue of forty-two columns of Greek marble, surmounted by a frieze of mosaic pictures; the glorious pavement of opus Alexandrinum, whose "crimson and violet hues temper the white and gold of the walls"; the grand baldacchino, with its four porphyry columns wreathed with gilt leaves; and the splendid tomb chamber of Pius IX. (predecessor of the late Pope Leo XIII.), with its riot of rich marbles and alabaster, in front of the high altar—to say nothing of the almost incredibly costly chapels opening into the nave—combine to give S. Maria Maggiore a proud place among the very finest of the fine basilicas of Rome.