Buona Pasqua!

My very belated collection of pictures from Easter Mass at St. Peter's.  For Masses like this, the Vatican organizes about 150 priests and deacons to help distribute Holy Communion.  You cannot concelebrate, but you do assist at the Mass.  To take part, you have to have a ticket and a letter of good standing.  I have the latter, and was able to get the former.  So, I went down to St. Peter's to distribute communion.  The instructions they give us are two:  We us the Latin phrase (Corpus Christi) rather than Italian or other vernacular, and communion may be given only on the tongue.  Having confronted the crowd of people wanting communion (250,000) and the very limited number of hosts, this is the only way to preserve proper reverence for the Sacrament.

I do not take pictures during Mass--and obviously could not bring my regular camera.  These are just with a phone camera and are either right before or right after the Mass.

New Pope in Pictures

A quick posting of all the pictures I took from the election.  Pray for Pope Francis!

Roman Christmas Trees

While walking, I took pictures of two of the larger Christmas trees in Rome.  Christmas trees are not really much of an Italian custom, much more German.  Nevertheless, like most things in our globalized culture, these customs spread, mostly because of American movies and television.

One of the friars here tells the story of a church here in Rome belonging to a group of non-Italian religious.  The religious superior wanted to put an Advent wreath in the church for the first time.  Advent wreaths are also not really an Italian tradition.  Anyway, it was put in the nave of the Church.  One of the local parishioners was seen standing in front of it, making the sign of the cross, and shaking her head slowly.  She thought it was a funeral wreath!  (Wreaths in Italian are pretty much only used at funerals.)  They stopped using the advent wreath.

These two trees are down the street from each other, one right next to the Colosseum and one in the Piazza Venezia.

Bl. Pope John Paul II Statue

Continuing on the art theme...

A few years ago, an artist did a statue of Pope John Paul II.  It was placed right near the Termini train station, just a bit south of the Piazza Republica.  Here is the picture I took of it last year:

From Rome - General

The Italians--and just about everyone else--hated it.  Well, with the outcry the artist decided to make some changes.  I think they were finished a few months ago.  Since I was walking nearby again today, I thought I'd snap some more pictures, here are two of them:

Huge change?  I suppose it's an improvement.  I'm not sure why they removed the grass.

Here's a close-up of the faces:

Igor Mitoraj

When I was in the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli, I saw a sculpture.  From what I gather this was supposed to be a statue of the head of St. John the Baptist:

From Santa Maria degli Angeli

When I saw this, I thought it looked very familiar.  I couldn't get out of my head--pun intended--that I had seen this somewhere before, only much bigger.  I thought it was in Chicago at first.  So, I finally went through my old pictures, and found this:

This one is from the market square in Krakow, Poland.  It's probably about 5 or 6 feet high, much bigger than the one in the Basilica.

But they are rather similar, no?

Well, it turns out they are from the same artist, a modern Polish artist named Igor Mitoraj.  Images of pieces of bodies is a common motif for Mr. Mitoraj, as especially is this sideways head.

Despite their similarity, they are meant to be depictions of two different figures.  The top one, as I mentioned, is of St. John the Baptism.  The bottom one usually goes by the title, Eros Bendato, or Eros Bound.  It's curious that the scuplture would cast these so similarly, Eros being the symbol of passionate love, and St. John the Baptist being the great martyr to marital fidelity.