Posted Jun 24th 2010, 01:45 PM
In a few hours, my daughter Sarah (age 15) and I will be on a plane headed to Rome. Our archdiocese is leading a pilgrimage, and we’re on it.
Some readers may remember that I was in Rome once before last year, on a press junket for Angels & Demons. They gave us the official Angels & Demons tour of Rome, walking in the footsteps of Robert Langdon from church to church as he unraveled the path of the Illuminati.
The idea of tourists going to the Eternal City to see St. Peter’s and other locales specifically through the lens of a badly written, anti-Catholic conspiracy novel is pretty depressing (although not as pathetic as Twilight fans heading to Forks, Washington for Twilighter tours).
Fortunately, I was able to stay a few days afterward, touring on my own, and making a sort of pilgrimage out of it. I wrote a bit about my experiences in an article on religion and science in Angels & Demons, and I posted photos from my trip at Jimmy Akin’s blog. Plus, I got to knock the film at the end of my European trip!
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It’s 5am Monday morning in Italy. I’m sitting on a rooftop veranda outside my hotel room in Assisi overlooking the sleeping countryside. The moon is high. Later today we’ll be in Rome.
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In my
first update I mentioned someone comparing Assisi to Minas Tirith, Tolkien’s imaginary tiered city on a hill. What I didn’t know at the time is that unlike Minas Tirith, where the lowest level is the widest circle and the royal house is at the crown, Assisi’s crown is at the bottom: beneath the lower Basilica of St. Francis, in the crypt where Francis’s tomb is situated in the midst of four of his famous followers.
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It isn’t until I actually see the procession of 38 new metropolitan archbishops walking up the center aisle at Saint Peter’s Basilica at the start of the Pallium Mass a little after 9:30 Tuesday morning, and hear the cheers from pilgrims of the 26 countries represented—Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe—followed by the Bishop of Rome, Benedict XVI, that it really hits me: This is the greatest visible display of the Church’s
catholicity that I have ever seen, and perhaps may ever see.
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Tuesday afternoon after the
papal Pallium Mass, the itinerary includes the catacombs of St. Callixtus and St. Paul’s Outside the Walls. I missed the catacombs on my first trip to Rome, so I’m really looking forward to this.
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