Every year, we Missionary Sisters from the House of Formation, together with the seminarians of the Fraternity of St. Charles, visit an Italian city to dive deeper into a period of the history of art, accompanied by our professor, Alessandro Rovetta. A few weeks ago, we were immersed in the Christian art and archaeology of the first centuries; and what better city than Rome, where we have the privilege of living, can offer us the occasion? We had already, the previous year, realized the value of living physically in the places where the first Christians lived. And so, in those three days, we discovered this concretely by visiting ancient works.
Mostly, we visited places tied to death: burial places, many tombs, and, above all, in the underground of Rome, the catacombs of St. Callistus, Priscilla and Domitilla. Millions of burial niches and cubicles stacked one on top of the other to take up as little space as possible, in dark, labyrinthine corridors. In this gloomy, damp environment—which, we can imagine, was once filled with foul odors—it was surprising to find so many white and colored images, and to sense an underlying theme common to them all: a sense of joy and life.
A testimony of faith has come down to us from our Christian friends who came before us.
In particular, the image of a certain figure accompanied us throughout all three days: the prophet Jonah. It really seemed as though Jonah appeared around every corner, depicted in a fresco with his arms wide open, raised toward the sky, next to the fish, as if to say to us: “Here I am, I’ve come back to life!” In addition to Jonah, other images told of resurrections, such as that of Lazarus, and of healings, such as that of the paralytic who returns home carrying his stretcher on his shoulders.
This expression of life was even more evident visiting the church of St. Stephen in the Round, a great circular edifice that is flooded by a potent natural light. The walls were completely covered in frescoes: after the cross of Christ, a series of martyrs, one after the other with no discontinuity. From St. Stephen who was stoned, to St. Peter, St. Agatha, St. Catherine of Alexandria, to the martyrs devoured by the beast in the Circus Maximus, scourged or burned alive. Before these martyrs, the most various and bloody, the thing that stood out the most was the light that filled the space, running along the walls and illuminating those images one by one, a physical light that is also the sign of the joyful offering made by these men and women.
In all of these places dedicated to death, the sensation that dominated at the end of the visit was that of much life, joy and resurrection.
And so, we saw the truth for ourselves of what Pope Leo XIV wrote just a while ago in his Apostolic Letter on the importance of archaeology. “Even a fragment of a mosaic, a forgotten inscription, or graffiti on a catacomb wall can recount the story of faith.” A testimony of faith in the cross and resurrection that reached us through our Christian friends who came before us and who, remaining in the places that were their own, are here, right in our own backyard.
