Greetings from the land of pasta, siestas and scooters. Life here has been even more full than normal over these past few weeks.
At the college, the orientation programme has given way to the regular programme of life, yet several notable happenings have been taking place on the side as well.
Obviously, the most significant extracurricular happening of late has been the canonisation of St Mary of the Cross MacKillop.
It has been an immense privilege and more than a little surreal to be in Rome for it all, and I must admit that it affected me more than I thought it would.
One day, Rome had the usual mix of bustling tourists and locals who had seen it all before, and almost overnight it was overtaken by a horde of Australian pilgrims, radiating a unique buzz that even several locals have commented to me about.
Hearing the Australian accent throughout the streets of Rome never failed to bring a smile to my face, and the canonisation ceremony itself in the square of St Peter’s had a real coming-of-age feel to it.
The Thanksgiving Mass the following day was also a remarkable experience, as the normally cavernous space of the Basilica of St Paul Outside the Walls was packed full with thousands of beaming Aussies.
I enjoyed following the coverage back home, and was encouraged by how much people seemed to be getting into it all.
It was also heartening to have our Archbishop visit with us following the festivities so as to renew that tangible connection with the Church back home.
A week earlier, 30 of my housemates were ordained for the Diaconate (the last step before priesthood), including one of my brother seminarians from Perth. The ceremony took place in St Peter’s Basilica (though not with the Pope), and I had the privilege of being part of the choir for Mass.
The sheer size of St Peter’s makes it a difficult place to sing – the sound seems to evaporate into thin air as soon as it’s out of your mouth – and having the brass section less than a metre from me didn’t help, but afterwards everyone said we sounded fine.
It was a bit surreal to think that, God willing, it will be me with my forehead on the floor in three years’ time.
During the post-ordination celebrations at the North American College, we had several civil and religious dignitaries in attendance. Due to a recent terrorism warning in Europe, this meant that we had a noticeable security presence on campus for the afternoon.
It turns out that the NAC is the largest stable civilian group of Americans in one place outside the US. It occurred to me that, in this regard, I’m effectively an American now (that is, by living in a prominent American institution in Europe).
I can only imagine what things will be like during the coming Consistory, when the NAC will be hosting all the American Cardinals.
Well, after a lengthy period of orientation and language studies, regular classes have finally begun. Indeed, it’s a bit strange to think that Christmas is approaching, and yet the school year is only a few weeks old. Nonetheless, it’s good to finally feel like a real student here instead of something approximating a glorified tourist.
Most of my lecturers speak fairly clear Italian, and at this point I can probably understand about a third of the lectures.
Indeed, it is becoming clear that having English as the house language at the NAC is both a blessing and a curse, in that we are generally slower at picking-up Italian than many others in our classes.
Nonetheless, the senior students assure us that passive comprehension starts to really come together after a few months, and in the meantime the various class notes and readings help make sure that we don’t miss out on too much content (my personal notes are a mixture of Italian and English, sometimes in the same sentence).
On the whole, I’m finding the material to be both interesting and not overly dense, though studying Latin in Italian is doing my head in a bit.
The start of classes also means that I am now out in the city almost every day and, as such, amusing little vignettes of Roman life are starting to emerge on a regular basis. For example, the only time we ever seem to see the Roman police doing anything is when they serve as traffic controllers at the major intersections during peak hour.
The traffic lights work fine, but in the tradition of “everyone-else-is-doing-it-so-why-can’t-I?”, when the traffic police are absent Roman drivers invariably fill the neutral space between the amber light and the red blocking the path of cars travelling in the perpendicular direction and thus making the bad peak hour traffic infinitely worse.
Mind you, it only took me a few days here to start crossing the road like a Roman (basically just walking in front of traffic at the slightest gap provided they’re not going too fast to stop), so I guess I can’t complain.
There is also apparently a superstition held by some Romans that walking in between two priests on the footpath can cause infertility.
Given that we wear clerics out to classes in the mornings, some of the guys have fun with it on occasion: two of them will walk on opposite sides of the pedestrian avenue and watch as some people go out of their way to squeeze around the outside – hours of fun for the whole family.
Of course, the in-your-face poverty and homelessness – combined with a decent helping of charlatans – that one finds on the streets here is less amusing.
Indeed, discerning how to respond appropriately to the regular requests (particularly given that we are often dressed in clerics and thus visibly representing Christ and the Church) is a regular topic of discussion and concern amongst the guys here.