The Vestal Morons

Vestal Morons Blog Has Moved! (and it lives!)

2011-11-28T06:01:00.002+01:00

The resurrected Vestal Morons blog can be found in its glorified body at:

https://vestalmorons.wordpress.com/

Be distracted

2005-12-04T17:30:00.000+01:00

Some of you may have noticed that there haven't been many updates on this blog for some time. Besides the fact that I one day woke up and suddenly realized that perhaps I should get a life, there's also the fact that we in Rome are immersed in the midst of finals, while trying to balance the difficult task of having as much fun as humanly possible. This blog has fallen a tad to the wayside.

And so, to distract you from the fact that there haven't been very many pretty photos lately to allow you to vicariously live the awesome lives that we Romans lead and to alleviate some of the burden of your own mind-numbing existence, I thought perhaps it would do well to distract you all with this one.

Julian has admitted that it is appropriate that he pay penance for not putting his own two cents into this blog on a more regular basis, but questions whether or not promulgating this photo to the world might be a little too severe. I think it is appropriate.

Clint's suffering is purely gratuitous.

And so enjoy the pretty picture.

At Rome's Opera House Several weeks ago

2005-11-27T18:21:00.000+01:00

This is just way too cool not to put up. From the opera house. I just wish blogger would let it be a little bigger. (Courtesy of Danni Ampi)

From the ballet several weeks ago at the opera house.

Vespers with il Papa on the eve of the Catholic New Year.

2005-11-26T22:45:00.000+01:00

Vespers with il Papa. See if you can find Julian. He's there. Oh yes, and Monica, though you'd have to really know that blond head of hers to pick it out.

Il papa.

Both Kaitlyn McCarthy and Adam Wilson can make the enviable claim that they have been the first of all of us to come close enough to, and to actually touch Benedict XVI. Ask them about it. I'm sure they'll be more than willing to do so.

St. Pete's Piazza earlier tonight. I love that place.

The Meaning of Mountains

2005-11-23T09:13:00.000+01:00

The Meaning of Mountains

By Romulus

Sometimes it seems to me this pilgrimage has been nothing more than a seeking after the tallest peaks and the most fantastic panoramas.

In looking back I see that so far I have conquered four of the tallest peaks surrounding Assisi. In Valdobbiadene we four squires nearly conquered the pre-alps, hiking through the frigid air along the crest of the mountains to the wooden cross that marks the second highest point. From that lowly point we looked desirously at the cross in the distance that marks the highest; and more desirously still towards Switzerland in the West, and the harsh, ghostly points of the Alps looming above the plain in between.

And then, in Siena a few weeks ago, built as it is on a large hill, approaching the full height of an Italian mountain, I promptly climbed to the topmost point; I was disappointed, however, when the medieval houses, thick, tall, and hedging in on the narrow cobblestone streets, afforded me no bird’s eye view of the town. And in Rome alone I have been to the top of I know not how many of the seven hills, wanting to see St. Peter’s, the epicenter of the earth, from every possible angle, and in as many varied sorts of natural lighting at as many times of day, or night, as possible.

This is natural, I think; this desire for heights. I am confirmed in this by others, and think I understand something of why it is so.

This semester, in reading The Path to Rome by Hillarie Belloc, I came across this marvelous passage, which is one that our moral theology professor repeats as many times as he possibly can:

‘These, the great Alps,” says Belloc, looking down on the world, with his feet firmly planted on one or another mountainous footstool, “seen thus, link one in some way to one’s immortality…Let me put it thus: that from the height of the Weissenstein I saw, as it were, my religion. I mean, humility, the fear of death, the terror of height and of distance, the glory of God, the infinite potentially of reception whence springs that divine thirst of the soul; my aspiration also towards completion, and my confidence in the dual destiny. For I know that we laughers have a gross cousinship with the most high, and it is this contrast and perpetual quarrel which feeds a spring of merriment in the soul of a sane man.”

I suppose that most everyone who has read Paschal’s Pensees, walks away with something different; the broad mind of the mathematician touches on most everything in one way or another. However, when I first read him, I recall being most struck at his awe at the strange and unique position of Man in the cosmos, and this has become a recurrent theme of my own thoughts, pulled forward whenever I feel the need to be astonished; that is, how man stands at the center of existence, with an infinity of largeness above him, and an infinity of smallness below him. In the physical world alone there is an infinite cosmos of stars and planets and space above him, and an infinite cosmos of insects and molecules and atoms and quarks and space beneath him; and there is man, bizarre creature that he is, standing starstruck in the middle, confronted when he turns his eyes in either direction, with infinity.

A man not starstruck is no man at all. “The world will never starve for want of wonders” says Chesterton, “but only for want of wonder.” And the awesome fact is that the great and inescapable paradox of our race is that we only catch glimpses of, or find our completion in the contemplation of the Infinite. Despite the fact that we are haunted by the distinct sense that we are unable as finite beings to obtain or contain it, we are just as sure that anything less than it is too little; we won’t, we are quite sure, be happy or complete without it.

That is, I believe, why so many men, especially now, are so unhappy. Not only does the modern man rarely, or never, plunge into or consider the vastness of his own interior and soul and desires, for fear of what he will find, but he is rarely even confronted with the most obvious of the vastnesses, physical creation, for fear of what it will lead him to think and desire; perhaps, he fears, it may even lead him to pray. And so he never steps beyond the narrow, frenetic streets of his city, or apartment flat, or the television or computer screen, to stand instead on the top of a mountain to look down upon it all, to see it all as maybe, possibly only a part of something much, much, mind-reelingly bigger than what he ever believed.

And even if he is ever confronted with physical vastness, generally he is so unprepared for the experience that he quickly squashes it down from four dimensions to two; he’ll take photographs of it, or videotape it, or read a book about it, like stepping on a cardboard box that’s too cumbersome to carry. He’ll put a photo of a mountain as the background of his computer desktop. Anything to tie down that motion of his mind towards things bigger than himself, to tie down the part of him that wants to consider all things in their infinite mystery of being.

In the past men thought that the earth was the center of the universe, and that there were ten crystal spheres, beyond the furthest of which was the kingdom of God. This is a claustrophobic cosmology, at least according to our current advanced understanding of the universe. And yet even then men were easily filled with awe. Even then men found something of a hint of what was to come, or what they were missing, by standing on the tops of mountains and spreading the world like a living map beneath their feet; in considering the paradox of their physical smallness and human largeness against the measure of the landscape.

And now physics and astronomy have told us of infinite space, and an infinite universe, and we are cold to it. Indeed, the new astronomer looks through a telescope and forgets that he is looking at the stars.

A symbol, it is said, is something that points towards something else. The richness of the Catholic understanding of creation has made it clear that in one sense all things are symbols; and this is precisely the great beauty of Catholic typology, and the mediaeval bestiaries. Thus, a man with an acute eye, and a finely attuned Catholic soul, will find in absolutely everything a sign of some great truth, and the greatest Truth. A man with an acute eye and a finely attuned Catholic soul will find symbols and meanings and significations in a cold dungeon cell as much as in a verdurous garden.

Yet, the simple fact is that there is a sort of simplicity of symbolism to be found in contemplating the world from great heights. Blessedly this serves to bring the process down to those of us who perhaps aren’t yet so attuned to symbols; for us it is a sort of primer course in Catholic perception.

There is also a certain simplicity of symbolism found in the very heights themselves; there is a barrenness, stripped of extraneous details, in which symbols spring out, or shoot forth, like a light from a beacon, which makes them almost impossible to miss.

Up on the pre-alps it was cold and desolate. And as we four raced to one of the crosses that mark all of the peaks, we passed by the carcass of a cow, dead and decomposing and grotesque, its protruding ribcage polished by numerous winds and rains and snows; and then, moments later, around the base of the cross against which we leaned to catch our breath were found tiny, brilliant flowers, shimmering with the colour of royalty, ecstatically alive. And beneath our feet the whole sixty or seventy flat, final miles of Italy, beyond which stretching plain may very well be the end of the earth; for nothing can be seen beyond the colossuses that stand watch over its borders, the Alpines.

There, in short, on top of that rock, that vast footstool, was everything. There was life, and there was death, and there was beauty, and there was the cross, and spread out before my vision something so very like infinity as to make one feel as though Heaven had already come, or was well on its way, and that this was it or something very like; and that was perfectly alright.

And that, I think, is something of the meaning of mountains.

The Decimation of Mr. Wunch's Class

2005-11-22T23:45:00.000+01:00

The Decimation of Mr. Wunch's Class
By Kathleen Gilbert

(N.B. If ignorant, please refer to last week's article by Claire O'Reilly on the Cult of B.O.D. for background info before viewing this comic and enjoying ensuing hilarity)

Shameless publicizing

2005-11-20T22:43:00.000+01:00

Meet Dala. Composed of Sheila Carabine and Amanda Walther, these two girls are longtime friends of mine. Sheila is my brother's girlfriend of three or something years. They've just released their first album, called Angels and Thieves, under Universal Records, and this is me shamelessly publicizing them to Vestal Moron's reading public. Check out their website at www.dalagirls.com (designed by my brother). Watch their music video. Buy their album. And most of all, enjoy their sweet, smooth melodies.

The Invasion of Chesterton

2005-11-18T15:46:00.000+01:00

Mr. Ahlquist hangs out with his best buddy in Piazza del Popolo.

The boys look very, very natural, strolling through the streets of Rome.

Hanging on the Spanish steps, also looking very, very natural. We also took some time to admire the Rolex billboard on the side of the church at the top of the steps.

Ah. Romulus and Remus reunite with their foster-mother.

At the Hassler Roof restaurant. Reputedly Chesterton stayed at this hotel, and ate at this restaurant some eighty-something years ago. At least that's what Mr. Ahlquist told us. I think he just really, really wanted to eat there. I can understand why. I'm not sure that his pocket did though.

Mr. Ahlquist gets cozy with Thomas Aquinas.

Father and son trying very hard to look very cool. I suppose they do a pretty decent job of it.

What is it with Mr. Ahlquist with this gold film guy anyway? I don't know.

Romulus and Remus enjoy the newest edition of Gilbert! magazine, complements of the president of the Chesterton society.

Mr. Ahlquist gives some talk about something or other in some icon shop somewhere in Rome or something. Anyway, it drew a pretty darn good crowd.

My future library. In the residence for American priests studying for their doctorate. They don't know it's my future library yet.

Translating the Latin text of St. Augustine's confessions. Me and Julian got through about a sentence and a half completely unaided. We felt pretty good about it. And after I took the book off the shelf I happened to notice that it was printed in 1729 and promptly freaked out and then spilled my pen with ink all over it. Actually, that's not true. But it was printed in 1729.

Chilling at the our favourite bar on Mr. Ahlquists last night in Rome. Good times. Oh and please ignore the fact that I look like a complete moron. You think you'd all be used to it by now.

Yes, that is a Caravaggio.

Cork Ireland

2005-11-18T10:25:00.000+01:00

After a hellish day of traveling, with hardly a bite to eat, we finally get what we came for: a pint, and an honest-to-goodness burger. There wasn't a bit of pasta anywhere in sight.

At the top of Blarney castle.

Kissing the Blarney stone. Many jokes were made about the necessity or prudence of my kissing it. Very funny.

Blarney castle.

Just hanging out in the gardens behind the castle.

Entrance to an old abandoned fortress. Pretty much the coolest place on earth...ever.

Inside the fortress.

Walking from the fortress to a path down by the shore to watch sunset we came upon an old, overgrown cemetary.

Ms. Shannon enjoyes the sunset.

...and the last final flare.

Drinking Irish coffee and hot chocolate in the pub on the way back to town from the fortress while the winds and rains raged outside. It was very comfortable...until we had to go back out into that to get back to town. The sheer amount of pubs in Ireland, and the amount of time they spend in them, makes a whole lot of sense.

The Roman Forum

2005-11-16T16:01:00.000+01:00

The Roman Forum Cont.

Oh, all right, so I didn’t call this thing the Roman Forum last week, so I don’t have much of a right to call it the Roman Forum 'continued' this week. But the fact is that it’s just such a bloody logical name for the thing, and unfortunately it only occurred to me after I threw last week’s edition together (at the last possible minute, as usual) and sent it whizzing off to the eagerly waiting Robert Turner. So this week it has a good name; or at least an appropriate, or appropriately obvious, name.

Anyway, here are some more of the thoughts of my fellow Romans. There was supposed to be one more articlette in the group, but apparently Mr. Clint Atkins had to watch Amadeus tonight, which, I suppose, is as good an excuse as I’ve ever heard from any procrastinating writer (and I’ve heard quite a lot of them, and come up with a few good ones myself). But the ever-faithful Julian Ahlquist also has his say, and I think it’s relatively safe to say that anything he writes is pretty far up there on the list the best things that have ever happened to this strange race of ours.

And so my second week of literary repose continues. I shall return in full force next week, to the chagrin of the article-length police. And for those who haven’t noticed, the thesis of a good number of these articlettes has been that you should come to Rome. You're an idiot if you don’t; really, I mean it.

Yours,
John J. Jalsevac

Iona Matthews:

I can't say that I've waited my whole life to get here, yet I have come to know many things since first stepping a tentative foot on this peninsula that is Italy. Being dropped in the middle of Rome as a student and being told that this is going to be your proverbial playground for the next three months is completely incredible...at first. But then excitement sets in, followed by a desire to see everything, do everything, taste everything! There are the thrills of the all the first time experiences: seeing St. Peter’s and all the Roman ruins, riding the metro, gypsies trying to steal your stuff, eating gelato, the list goes on and on.

Once the initial thrill of being a temporary Roman wears off you begin to learn about the truly important things of life as a Roman citizen. To name just a few: Rome is beautiful; moped drivers are insane; there are more churches to be visited in Rome than could be thought possible; Rome is the city of martyrs and saints on every street corner; and of course, gelato is the staff of life.

But when I leave Italy to return to my own home in the States I will easily say that the deepest love that I bring back with me from Rome is that for our Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI. He is no longer the Holy Father that I know only through the media, but he is the Holy Father that I have personally seen, been blessed by, and witnessed the love that crowds of tens of thousands have given him. Having a father away from home and feeling that the Vatican is truly my residence three thousand miles away from my land of habitation prove to be two very comforting elements that Rome offers. In short, life is good, Rome is good. Don't pass up an opportunity to visit the eternal city or you will eternally regret it.

The Cult of B.O.D.
By Claire O’Reilly

I wanted to share with those at home what has been on my mind here in Rome:
Tuesday night I was going crazy. My head itched so badly. I marched into Monica’s room and begged her, “Check me for lice!” Within ten minutes, she found some tiny eggs and a bug. This, of course, set all the girls in motion furiously searching through each other’s hair. Minutes later, my roommate, Bridget discovered that she was infested also. All told, there were seven girls chosen for this special vocation. Bridget had it the worst and thus, we concluded, she was the carrier. Everyone was just a little concerned because we did not know where they had come from. Rome is notorious for being dirty. Had Bridget contacted it on a bus, train, in brushing up against a street bum? Maybe it was even the hotel we stayed in? With this uncertainty in the air, everyone felt very uncomfortable and itchy, even if it was only psychological.

We stayed up late that night extracting the tiny bugs from each others hair. Although it took some time to adjust to the foul thought (and reality!) of providing a habitat for insects, we were able to joke about it. As we pulled bugs from Bridget’s ‘hotel’, she would joke, “Don’t take Tom!” or, “There goes Larry—he was my favorite.” We had also just returned from a three day silent retreat in Assisi where, afterwards, Mr. Akers had warned us that the devil would be out to get us because of all the graces we had recently received. Within 24 hours we discovered lice! For a bunch of young girls, it can definitely be humiliating! We laughed at God’s sense of humor. Though not contaminated, Danni Ampi generously and courageously helped in the nit picking. I heard her chuckle under her breath, “This is definitely going on my wife resume!”

Despite the joking, we had still become lepers. The next morning we could not go to class because we had to wash all our clothes at the laundry mat and then treat ourselves with shampoo to kill the lice. During that time, to surprise us, the hotel fumigated all the rooms, so even the “clean” students were homeless for the rest of the day. That night, all the infected girls and some of their uninfected roommates were sent to the basement of the hotel to spend the night in a big hostel dorm room with a large bathroom and many showers. We took turns lathering our scalps with lice disinfectant shampoo, containing chemicals that render it illegal in the U.S.

At this point we were still trying to figure out where these creatures had come from. As girls traced through Bridget’s hair, she traced through her past. She remembered babysitting some kids over the summer, not realizing that they had had lice until afterwards. She had so many bugs that it was most likely that they had been with her that long. We now refer to all the girls here who have lice as belonging to the Cult of B.O.D. (Bridget O’Donnell)

So, in the end, lice cannot be attributed to Rome. The lice are American and we become ‘dirty’ Americans. However, lice are picky and prefer clean, unscented hair. In defense of my roommate, Bridget does wash her hair all the time. One of the preventatives for lice is olive oil. I suppose it is a good thing then, to be in the land of olive oil. Ironically, in this fight against lice, greasy hair can be an ally.

Also, thanks to Mr. Alquhist (Julian’s Dad), who is visiting, we have plenty of American lice shampoo.

I know that every Rome semester is different, but this one definitely has had an interesting twist! The girls of the cult are combing and disinfecting their hair furiously, so we will be clean by the time we come home before Christmas. Lice is the biggest problem when it goes undetected. So if your head itches, find somebody who knows what to look for and have them check you!

Julian's Rambler Article

2005-11-16T02:06:00.000+01:00

The Floor
By Remus

After my Mildew article last week, I realized my Rambler publications had reached an all time low. As one excavates deeper and deeper into the baseness of human existence, one, like Augustine, will have a dramatic conversion. Thus, I will now proceed to write a serious article. So, for those of you without the ability to read serious things (such as I), do not read further.

Throughout my life, I’ve had a problem with liking things. Specifically, liking things that are good and beautiful. I’ve gotten better with effort. But still, whether it be my sins, the culture, bad friends, or something unknown, I have a real problem with appreciating a truly beautiful, good thing. Maybe that’s not true. But somehow, I’m immediately turned off to something that another person enjoys – initially, at least. But I’ve gotten better. Through effort, through some prayer, through some thoughtfulness and personal experience, I’ve suddenly inclined my head and seen something anew and understood what the big deal was. Normally, I tend to get distracted, sometimes by pretty trivial things that no one else notices. Other people, simpler people, see and awe at the big picture, while I get bogged down on the details and miss the overall point. At the same time, I pride myself in noticing these overlooked details. On the other hand, I am envious of simpler people’s more profound knowledge.

In Rome, specifically, I’ve encountered this phenomenon. Going from basilica to basilica, I see people’s faces in their wonder. I appreciate the artwork as well, but with a more forced spirit. People look up in awe, and I look down in discomfort. I cannot ascend to the higher appreciation of beauty – I just look at the floor. But the floors of basilicas are very beautiful. They do tend to be the more meaningless parts of churches, but that’s not so bad. Their “cosmotesque” designs are inoffensive geometrical decorations that even the atheist would like. They do not try to express any dogma. They do not force upon one a supernatural guilt-trip and sense of unworthiness. They are the basest of decorations, the most humble, for they are trampled underfoot. Like humility, the floor is a good foundation for everything else. It one day struck me that these marble designs lay on the floor as if prostrate, as if to indicate all creation, no matter how low, gives praise to the Christ. I don’t know how I arrived at this. I then thought, if these beautiful things glorify the Creator, they have something in common with these statues of the saints. I could then understand the statues in a new light, who had actual faces that look toward the altar, their hands pointing inward to their hearts. I could start to understand the church as a whole. I could understand them to their domes and to their spires that stretch up to heaven like spiritual antennae.

My father, this week, came to Rome to visit me. We climbed the holy steps on our knees – the holy steps brought over from Jerusalem that Christ ascended when condemned to die by the decree of Pontius Pilate. I realized later that Christ actually ascended those steps. Here in Rome you ... daresay, take for granted all these relics ... and personally I forget to realize that Christianity is true – that God is real. Even so in Rome. The Holy steps are now covered in wood lest the pilgrims continue to wear it down, but certain spots of it can be seen through holes in the wood protected by glass, against which people touch their rosaries. Through those holes you can see the faint stains of Christ’s blood. Even now my eyes water. I’ve never felt this way. For most of my Catholic life I’ve prayed for some heartfelt reaction to the passion, and this now has happened. Next to the holy steps there’s a statue of Christ at the Agony of the Garden, kneeling on a stone, looking up to heaven, and shedding a tear. Even a year or so ago I would not have felt anything at this. Here in Rome, I have learnt the startling thing that Christ is a person.

For years and years, I could not identify myself with Christ. I would look at the Eucharist, look at the statues, look at the holy cards and my eyes would gloss right over. Other people around me seemed to understand. Frustrated and pissed off, I would mentally scream, “I don’t get it! What’s wrong with me?!”

Even a couple years ago, if I read those words I would feel nothing. I would be bored by them. I would have heard them before in other ways from so many other people that seemed to get it. But recently, the Gospel was the parable of the lady going to the unjust judge, showing how if one can sway an unjust person by constant requests, one can sway God who is just with even greater ease by perseverance in prayer. I’ve been trying to figure out how to attain some personal relationship with Christ because I saw it in other people, though not in me at all. I prayed and prayed and eventually it clicked. That’s how prayer works. It’s hard and miserable and frustrating and no one likes it, but the saints show how it can be done. And, the scary thing is, all prayers are answered.

I had been seeing Christ too much as a concept. Christ is a person. I don’t know how I came to realize that. It was too obvious to notice in my case. Too clichéd almost. But, think of people and friends you admire, and think of their qualities, and think how you think about them. In some scary way, that’s how you should think about Christ. It’s scary, I think, because Christ has seemed this distant abstract mystical thing, an ideal and all good, but hard to love, while in fact, he is very personal, like an actual friend – a really good friend – who cries for you, who suffers for you when you don’t know it but suffers anyway. You don’t understand. You don’t understand what the passion is for. But he suffers anyway. And you don’t care.

But like the floor, be humble. Be humble and honest. Humility is the foundation of all virtue. In prayer be humble and lay out on the ground what is on your heart, and God will purify those desires. Even if progress does not seem to happen, be humble again, knowing that you are too small to see everything, and so keep praying. Be humble and open and let the Architect work his designs, and he will build a basilica for your soul.

Ramblings from Rome

2005-11-08T20:41:00.000+01:00

Ramblings from Rome

By Romulus (not really)

For Christendom College's The Rambler

At this juncture of the semester, we Christendom students, so blessed to be studying in Rome, have traveled at least from one side of Italy to another, and many of us much further besides. We have seen things, and heard things, and felt things, that we would never have seen, heard or felt in North America; and all these things have made enormous impressions on all of us.

Since my arrival in Rome I have been writing a weekly column for The Rambler, trying with much futility to communicate these things to those back in Virginia, and to the many parents and friends elsewhere whom I have gradually discovered have been religiously reading Vestal Morons, or at the very least enjoying the photographs. Many have expressed pleasure and thanks that there has been this contact between the Christendom of Rome and the Christendom of the United States. This contact is vital, I have been told.

People love to hear from the Rome students.

And yet I am well aware that I have been wholly unable to communicate the full depths of the experiences we have had. In fact, for the most part I have shied away from trying my hand at expressing some of the deepest lessons that we have learned, the most striking and lasting impressions made, knowing the limitations of my abilities. Furthermore, I have only been able to even attempt to communicate a mere fraction of our ever-burgeoning store of experiences, and only from my own, personal, narrow perspective.

After this week’s retreat in Assisi I decided that enough was enough, that the other students here should really have their say, their chance to offer their point of view. And so I asked as many of the students here as had the time, if they could please write a little something about their experiences for The Rambler. A very many of them responded enthusiastically to the invitation. And so here are a very few of their short, off-the-cuff compositions. These will serve as this, as well as next week’s, official installments of Ramblings from Rome.

Cheerio and God bless.

Sincerely,
John J. Jalsevac

Kaitlyn McCarthy:

We all knew that it was coming. Angela McNeely and John to my left and right respectively both knew. We had sat there since seven AM waiting. It had rained, drizzled, poured, stopped, and a combination of any one of those somewhere in between.

And then it happened.

A very refined English Monsignor spoke: “And from the United States, lecturers and students from Christendom College.”

We all shot out of our seats and cheered. And cheered. And did I mention that we cheered? We were all so loud that the Germans turned around and looked. The English were appalled as usual. Even the rowdy Spaniards were surprised. We cheered in front of 50,000 people. But we just couldn’t help ourselves – We love the Pope.

A few weeks ago, when Dr. O’Donnell came over with the Christendom pilgrims, we attended a Wednesday audience. Since we arrived so early, we were able to grab seats up close, about twelve rows from the front. Although it may sound silly to some, this audience was exciting. There was an energy running through the entire crowd – perhaps their first time seeing His Holiness or their first time in Rome. After they said Christendom’s name, we shouted, hooted and hollered, and Pope Benedict waved. Twice. Just ask Mr. O’Herron, and I’m sure he would be more than happy to tell you all about it.

For myself, it just kept hitting me -- that’s the Pope! Right there. He wasn’t on TV or on a Catholic newspaper, but close. I may not have had the honor to meet him, or take a photo with him, or tell him how white is my favorite color too, but just to see the Vicar of Christ was enough for me.

Mary Bergida:

Mystical places—sanctuaries on earth where the Divine has dramatically brushed the human. These places have always seemed remote and far away from my own experience. But last Thursday, I found myself in the midst of one…The rhythm of my dogs on the damp road, the air moist and hushed, the gilded forest rising over me…I could have been taking a stroll through the Shenandoah Park on a November afternoon. Mount Subiaso felt like home, felt like the Blue Ridge Mountains. How could this be the stage for the fiery Seraph to brand it’s wounds on St. Francis? I would have expected an ethereal landscape. Yet, Christ, apparently, was content with this natural setting to transform His small friend even more into His holy image. And now, over seven hundred years later I too was seeking God on this holy, but almost familiar mountain.

We were all on the second day of our silent retreat in Assisi. I can’t conceive a more serene, yet spiritually charged landscape in which to deepen our relationship with Christ. Throughout those three days of silence, Saints Francis and Clare walked out of the pages of their biographies, and became as spiritual friends as I trod the same streets and mountains as they did.

I have found this same bond woven in St. Peter’s, the Coliseum, St. Catherine’s cell, St. Agnes’ tomb, as in a hundred other places. It is the bond of the Church Triumphant and Militant—an initiation into the Communion of Saints like none other. These historic places where the Church has triumphed in the past—where martyrs have been shredded by wild beasts for Christ, or saints have conversed with God. I have been able to touch them, walk through them, pray among them. These “mystical places” are wet, cold, smelly, sometimes filthy. Often they are also beautiful—but always in a natural way. The Divine brushes humanity in ordinary places.

So as I hiked up Mount Subiaso last Thursday afternoon, I realized Francis too was an ordinary human, on an ordinary mountain, given an extraordinary gift.

As I have walked with Francis and so many other saints this semester, their lives have become a deeper call to holiness. A journey which can be entered into in any age or in any place, even places whose appearances are less than mystical.

Katie Pondo:

Dear People of the United States of America,

These are my very first, and probably last words in The Rambler. So I suggest everyone clip this, frame it and hang it in your dorm rooms.

So Rome is nice, Florence was great, Siena amazing and Assisi outstanding. I have to say Florence was the best for shopping and I found if you argue long enough you can get great prices!

Altogether living in Italy so far has been an incredible experience, although the classes are crammed and studying is rushed and hard. But the overall experience you receive is well worth it.

I would definitely suggest it to all those who need to lose fat and gain some major muscle! Italian walking works wonders. I think Dr. Top should promote this trip titled “fat camp”.

I must put a warning out there to all the girls coming next semester (from all the girls this semester) to watch out for those Italian men. Especially the old ones who look cute, innocent and old, but actually like to be very affectionate. Thank goodness for superhero Jeff who doesn’t mind giving them a piece of his mind!

To sum it up (as I’m running out of things to say), if I live today and die tomorrow seeing what I’ve seen and experienced what I’ve experienced, I would die a happy Katie Pondo.

So I guess I’ll end by saying I miss you all (especially Chris of course) and I’ve been praying for you all.

Love you lots,
Katie Pondo.

P.S. Hi Beth Trunie, Stitch, Ferdi and all my good old buddies that live and party at Chris’ house. Love you all; be home soon.
P.P.S Everyone should definitely come to Rome for Spring semester! (You’re welcome Nancy.)

Angela Von Ehr:

From the day I was accepted at Christendom, I looked forward to participating in the Rome program. I was excited about spending a semester in Italy, but most of all, I wanted to see the Pope. I was saddened that Pope John Paul had died and I wouldn’t see him in person, but I was also very excited to see the new Holy Father, Pope Benedict.

I saw Pope Benedict for the first time at Castle Gandolfo, the summer papal residence. The castle is in a little town, on a high hill, above a large lake. We stood in line outside the castle for three hours, in order to enter the inner courtyard of the castle where the Pope comes out to give his blessing and lead the Angelus.

At noon, Pope Benedict came out on the balcony overlooking the courtyard and the Christendom students were about twenty feet away from him. I had never imagined I would be so close to the Holy Father, and able to see him up close! I realized that the pope is a very real person, and my own spiritual father. When the pope greeted each group of visitors, in their own language, I knew how much he truly cared for each and every member of the Church.

The second time I saw Pope Benedict was at the Papal mass for the opening of the World Synod of Bishops. Not only did the Holy Father pass within a few feet of me, during the opening and closing processions, but I participated at a Mass celebrated by the Supreme Pontiff. This was the most profound experience with the true nature of the Church which I ever hope to experience.

As I watched Pope Benedict XVI celebrate mass, at the high altar of St. Peter’s, I knew it was directly over the tomb of the fisherman and surrounded by statues and tombs of 2,000 years of popes. I realized I was seeing the fulfillment of Christ’s words to Simon “you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My Church.” St. Peter’s Basilica, the central church of Christendom, is literally built on the tomb of St. Peter, and filled with 2,000 years of papal history. But the true center and foundation of the Church is the living successor of the fisherman, the small man in white, with the wonderful smile. Seeing Pope Benedict, surrounded by pilgrims, priests, and bishops from all over the world, I understood the true meaning of one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.

I think that every Christendom student should take advantage of the unrepeatable opportunity to live in the Eternal City. Not only the 2,000 years worth of Church heritage, but the real and living “rock” of the Church, Pope Benedict XVI.

(As always comments, questions, concerns, personal slurs, insults , or donations of multi-millions--we accept Visa, Mastercard and even American Express--may be e-mailed to John at jjalsevac@lifesite.net, or Julian at julesarts@hotmail.com)

Assisi

2005-11-08T19:16:00.000+01:00

Assisi.

On the way to Assisi the boys feel the strange urge to sing the song "Alcohol" by what's-his-face-country-singer-dude at the top of their lungs. They give in to the urge.

One blue gloaming in Assisi.

The view, if I am not mistaken, from Christina's room (Courtesy of Christina)

One rainy night in Assisi. One quickly falls in love with the very buildings and paths, and alleyways and stairways of Assisi.

One foggy morning in Assisi... (Courtesty of Christina)

One foggy afternoon in Assisi.

One foggy morning in Assisi.

The same foggy morning.

On retreat. Unfortunately because we spent three days in silence and contemplation and not taking photos I have very few photos of father Dylan. This is the best one I could come up with. An astoundingly inspiring, and very practical and mystical (the two aren't opposed to one another) retreat master.

Yellow.

Julian's Rambler Article for this week

2005-11-08T11:53:00.000+01:00

Mildew

By Remus

For Christendom College's The Rambler

Recently, I discovered a large ball of wet laundry in my suitcase. “Oh,” I said, “I wonder if this is going to be a problem.”

Apparently, there is a fungus called “Mildew” that grows on clothes that are left wet for too long. When first I decided to leave this pile of soaking garbs in this small concealed prison, airily I thought what unfavorable consequences might come of it.

Learned men and, moreover, women to whom I disclosed this discovery told me I was an “idiot” and beckoned me to re-wash them so as to destroy the attack of mildew, who, elusive but ripe now with resources, could attack and conquer at any moment. They urged that the cotton and polyesters then be purged with sun-rays afterwards; but this grandiose process did not please me.

Before the revelation, I spent 8-hours washing these meddlesome fabrics. The hotel fortunately provided two washing machines, one of which we are banned from using. The other machine, two-feet in diameter, takes 1.5 hours to do its thing, and for our consolation, they tell us that it’s an average brand in Europe, and for some reason, they think that’s a good thing. It took me hour just to figure out how to turn it on. Abstinence from dryers they also practice, and this too they uphold as a good and honorable thing. They don’t practice the faith anymore though. Drying racks, their substitute for dehydrating material, I have experienced, religiously don’t work. Furthermore, prior to the recent purchase of more drying racks in the hotel, there still does not exist adequate room for all the drowned laundry to heal among the competing students of Christendom’s Rome program.

I had never heard of mildew before. Rather, I had thought it some romantic condensation of crystal-sparkling water formed on the grass of a cold autumn morning. A fantastical concept it was to think that it was an evil cancer of the clothes that now threatened to strip me naked.

I would, I said, Febreeze them if they got any ideas – Febreeze being that spray of beautiful cosmetic fragrance – and though evil would not be extinguished, this gentle snow covering upon the dung would provide me satisfactory camouflage in society. I, however, still feared evil. I asked around if anyone understood the chemistry of mildew, trying to justify my nonchalant inactivity toward fixing this problem. All my advisors did not satisfy my scientific curiosities but plainly commanded me to wash my clothes again.

I began believing that this mildew scare was a bad dream or at least an old wives’ tale. How ridiculous it was to think that clothes, brand new clothes such as mine, could all of a sudden become victim to a fabric leprosy. I smelt them for the first two days and found nothing wrong with them. “Ha,” spoke I, “Fools. They thought to condemn me for these fabricated crimes. They thought to fool me with stories of boogey-monsters, but there is nothing here to fear.” Every time I would lift a questionable dress shirt to my nose and proclaim its innocence, I felt in the back of my olfactory subconsciousness, “You know, thaht didn’t smell right.” Soon, the feeling got worse, perhaps psychologically worse at first and then physically. I settled for the fact that my paranoia had clouded my perception of reality, so I went for second opinions. I would stuff the shirt in a person’s face and say, “Does this smell like mildew to you?” but I received different diagnoses, and this threw me into greater confusion and madness.

My roommate, John Jalsevac of Toronto, a connoisseur of human experience, knowledgeable in music, literature, and liqueurs, began telling me, “This room smells like mildew.”

“How do you know?” I snapped, rancorously.

“Because I know what mildew smells like.”

“No,” I countered, “It’s just a weird Italian laundry detergent I used.”

This conversation ended awkwardly. No more than a day passed when John raised his objection again.

“This room really smells like mildew.”

“Shut up!” I roared. “It’s not mildew, it’s laundry detergent!”

“No, man, it’s mildew. Trust me.”

“No, it’s not true, that’s impossible!”

The incubus was real. The monster breathed its hideous breath. I would have sooner believed in vampires, but now the evil presence was manifestly among us. But I did not take steps to slay the beast but rather held onto the faith that it could not harm my body, though perhaps my soul.

I could not smell it except under point-blank nasal inhalations. John would complain that he could sense it everywhere. I would tell him,“Some cultures consider the smell of mildew a very beautiful aroma.” John then informed me that I was lying and that mildew was unhealthy to breathe. Death! First, a harmless mythological mushroom that ate socks; now a spirit of the air that persecuted humans. It was getting out of hand. Eventually, though I had largely lost my mind as well as sense of smell (in previous college dorms), I myself had begun detecting this airborne pestilence. When I would enter the room, a strong tidal wave of fungus would smack me in the face, as I would shout back, “Get thee behind me!”

Since now it threatened my body as well as my roommate, I surrendered myself to laundry-washing reconciliation. I examined my clothes and took them to the washing machine, which sat opened-mouthed at my sudden return. I stuffed its mouth with the moldy food, let it wash it down with water for awhile, and then strewed its regurgitations up on the sunroof to cook. We’re not allowed to expose underwear there, so I had to walk along the roof discretely and find a concealed area to do so unseen. When I returned at the end of the day, nothing had dried. I raised my fist up to the sun and shouted, “Curse you, Phoebus! You cook my temper but not my pants!” I took the underwear and hung the licit articles on the rooftop racks which also hung the other Christendom student laundry – smarter people’s laundry.

The next day, it rained. Not too badly. I figured it would dry and figure things out so I didn’t mess with it. The following day, it stormed. I didn’t even want to know what was happening up there. Periodically, I would look out the window, and moaned to the person next to me, “Oh. My ... laundry. Oh. Man.” People either urged me to rescue it or let it hang to dry the next day, but I predicted an unending cycle of despair. The storm within me swayed back and forth, but I finally got to the roof and opened wide the door:

All my clothes were in wet clumps on the ground. The drying racks had fallen, and all my clothes were scattered like little sheep. One drying rack had miraculously flipped entirely over, which is not meteorologically possible considering its shape. It looked like a deliberate act of vandalism on Jupiter’s part. I simply inputted the wreckage back into the machine for a third baptism.

Not all leprous clothes received this privilege on account of its limited capacity, so complaints of stench were still submitted. Never did I suspect that I myself, however, carried this aura. This changed when someone told me. Apparently, I smelled like mildew. This dejected me. I knew I was losing friends.

Before we left for Florence, where I required another load of laundry, the one usable washing machine in the hotel broke down. Mr. Akers, our teacher and dean, the day before our departure, commanded me to take my clothes to a Laundromat.

This I did.

And all was well. In Florence, Clint Atkins discovered this nice little Indian restaurant which we attended three and almost four times. During my last visit, having ordered Mutton and Kous-Kous for a boastful third time, one of the chunks of mutton slipped from my fork and left its juicy trace down my sweatshirt and cargo pants. We continued eating for half-an-hour until Adam Wilson reached under the table and retrieved the deserted chunk, as we proclaimed, “The lost sheep!”

Anyway, that sweat-shirt and pants were pretty much the only clothes I had on this trip to Florence, and the convent which housed us at the time did not offer washing machines. I scrubbed them in the sink, but when they dried, the mutton stains came back, so I washed them again. They did not dry for some time. When they finally did, I feared I had conjured the demon of mildew again, but I didn’t. It was okay.

Then, when we came back to Rome, where I had access to the rest of my clothes, I found that the plague had festered a bit and breathed new life. Ruthlessly, I hunted down the possessed socks, underwear, and shirts, locked them up in my suitcase, mowed down the room with Febreeze and cried myself to sleep.

Even now, they sit imprisoned in that pandora’s suitcase of death.

I will not dig a moral message out of this heap of nonsense but just encourage you all to tell your friends not to read this article. Don’t worry. Next week’s article will be good.

Florence

2005-11-06T18:09:00.000+01:00

Florence

Uh...girls...turn around. Florence is behind you. No, no, it's not inside your camera...I swear.

Would you hate me if I didn't tell you what they were all looking at?

Claire doing deep things in Florence.

A very weird photo. I love it. The entranceway of a church up on one of the hills of Florence. Amazing singing of Compline by the monks. Haunting and beautiful.

Oh don't ask me the name of the church please. It was in Florence and I could get you there no problem if you put me back in Florence; that much I know. But it was gorgeous. This is just a reminder of the sort of thing we're encountering all the time over here. It is a good lesson on how to give glory to God. 70's architecture with its silly semi-circular structures and slanting roofs, and spinning ceiling fans, can go suck a lemon.

Ms. Erin praying in the gorgeous nameless church.

Oh, all right, it's a photo of me. But it's a photo of me with a $600 Florentine leather jacket (Florence is quite famous for its leather). And no, Cassidy and all concerned sisters may breathe easy; I did not buy it.

Some of the most incredible jazz musicians/guitarists I have ever had the pleasure of hearing. These were not your typical street buskers. I feel like somebody should just give them a million dollars or something for being as good as they are. We gave them what we had, a glass of our wine we had brought up to the hill with the intention of watching sunset fall over Florence. They appreciated that.

A very bizarre picture of some of the girls dancing to the smooth melodies of the very awesome jazz musicians.

Florence by night, after a very lovely sunset and all accompanied by some rather spectacular jazz.

The cathedral in Florence. (Courtesy of Kaitlyn)

Katie moves in on the drummer boys. Chris immediately flies to Florence.

Mrs. Akers, she tried so very, very hard to give a tour on this day. The microphone, it tried so very hard to help. The gods were against her. I won't say much more. I think Julian plans to say more about this in the near future. (Courtesty of Kaitlyn)

After seeing all these statues of this, that and the other thing, I really do wonder why people haven't made more statues like this. Anyway, this photo is awesome. (Courtesy of Kaitlyn)

Some church some where in Florence. (Photo courtesy of Kaitlyn)

The creation of...Clint?...by Adam? Wait a minute... (Courtesty of Katilyn)

This Past Week's Notice in The Rambler

2005-11-06T17:40:00.000+01:00

Ramblings From Rome
Tuesday November 1, 2005

As a consequence of the fact that Christendom's Rome students are on their fall break, moving between Rome, Florence, Assisi, Siena, and a few other places besides, there will be no installment of Ramblings from Rome this week. Tomorrow (Wednesday) morning most of the students will be beginning a three day long silent retreat in Assisi. Both Julian, myself, and all the others ask that you remember us in your prayers, that the next three days will be spiritually fruitful and that we will all be open to the voice of God as we seek his will for our lives in silent contemplation.

John J. Jalsevac

This week's Rambler Article

2005-10-26T21:50:00.000+02:00

The Land of Milk and Honey (and Wine)
Part II

By Romulus

We are late for lunch. This is not a good thing. It is a terrifying thing.

At the wheel is Sergio Mionetto, world-renowned maker of some of the finest wine in all of Italy, and arguably clinically insane (though, of course, I put little faith at all in the classifications of clinics; I only mention this as a desperate attempt to put the man into some sort of perspective). He drives faster and tries to whistle carelessly, but is unconvincing.

We haphazardly wind through the pre-alps, speeding on concrete roads that frequently and unexpectedly fold into sudden hairpin turns. Every so often we break out through the trees, at which moments we are firmly hit, flat in the eyes, with a vision of the whole gigantic panorama of the verdurous, sprawling valley of Venezia, before it is snatched away as we again speed back into the dense forest.

Of all of Julian’s relatives to leave waiting Zia Pia is, by a large margin, the one about whom a wise man would say, “never, ever, ever…ever…ever!...stand up Zia Pia.” She too, I am quite sure, could also acquire the classification of clinically insane, and she knows it, and, I think, would look upon such a prognosis as something of a trophy. I suspect she would frame the doctor’s official diagnostic forms, and place them in a prominent spot in her house for all to admire, and point it out when visitor’s came over to lunch as anyone else would proudly showcase their child’s honour roll certificate.

We are keeping Zia Pia waiting. Sergio, a man of infinite assurance, has begun to surreptitiously sweat blood. “No wine...no wine!” he says, turning about to the four terrified squires. “Traffic!”

The four of us look uneasily at each other. It is a Saturday afternoon, in a remote region of Venezia; we haven’t seen another car on the road for ten minutes. Traffic, it seems, is an excuse that may border on untruth, and is, to boot, quite unlikely to get by the shrewd Italian matron who is Zia Pia.

The simple fact is that we are late because of wine; albeit very, very good wine, though I suspect that fact won’t serve to mitigate the guilt. We wonder just how far mental reservation will get us in this case. Sadly there is no Mr. O’Herron around to answer the conundrum. For a moment I stop and wonder how any man can ever safely navigate this life, in all its infinite variety and flavour, without a personal moral theologian standing close by. I knew I should have brought one with me.

Today has not been a typical day. It began at ten o’clock when I gently and pleasantly slid into consciousness. Sauntering over to the blinds, waiting for Geoffredo (Geoff Turecek) to finish showering, I thought I might give them a tug. I did. They slid open, and for the second morning in a row I was stunned by the blaze of light that afforded me a distant view of the tips of the spires of Venice, sixty-something kilometers East; I breathed a sigh of satisfaction.

After an enormous breakfast served by Bicche, one of Julian’s great aunts, who is so accomplished in the practice of Xenia that she makes one feel as if one is doing her a favour by eating her food and staying in her house, Sergio picks us up.

As we weave in what some might consider a slightly-too-rapid fashion through one or another of the dozen towns we pass through, Sergio explains that he has been pulled over four times on the main drag of this town alone. Each time the police officer has let him off the hook. That’s the sort of man he is. He is Sergio Mionetto; his very name graces the bottle of one of the most affordable, finest, and most delicious of the effervescent wines the region affords.

We arrive at our morning’s destination. It a large warehouse wallowing in a sea of vines. The parallel lines of the vineyards that race along the mountainsides give the impression of a long series of Mesopotamian ziggurats, and one can’t help but wonder if the ancient architects of those mystic constructs took their inspiration from such vineyards. The vines here all produce the prosecco species of grapes. This rare species can only be grown in this relatively tiny region of Italy, with the Alps on the West, and the Mediterranean on the East, one producing the moist and mild air needed for the grapes, and the other acting as a colossal trap, catching the precious air in its Westward movement, and forcing it to stick around long enough to breathe life and vitality into the vines.

It is our difficult task, for the next hour and a half, to follow Sergio through the towering rows of twenty and thirty-thousand liter tanks of vinifying, divine liquid. With each new tank we purify our wine glasses by pouring a little of the wine into them from a tap in the side of the tank. We swish it about a little, and dump it into a bucket carried about for the purpose. And in this manner each new wine, all with their own distinctive flavours and nuances, all at a different stage of the process of vinification, is poured over our palate, unsullied and pure.

Americans, North Americans (to include my native turf), I feel compelled to point out, do not understand wine. They do not understand drinking on the whole really.

I once had the pleasure of working at a five star restaurant in Toronto. It boasted one of the most accomplished sommelier’s (professional wine-tasters) in the country, and was filled with the sort of men who know at what temperature wine ought to be served, and in what type of glass, and all such sorts of cryptic etiquette.

And yet I am not sure that even they understood wine; more than anything, they seemed to think it was the focal point of a game, or a pseudo-religion, with ornate and secret, Masonic-like rituals. More than a drink they seemed to think or imagine it a deity, and often these men appeared to me, with all their posing and posturing, as very silly people. I often laughed at them in secret.

But to experience the sincere joy with which Sergio uncorks a bottle of Mionetto wine at the dinner table is itself a an experience; to note the evident pleasure with which he sniffs the cork (a sure means, so I am told, of assuring the quality of a wine for a wine-taster in the know) is itself a pleasure. “This is my spirit,” he says about the bubbly liquid. He smacks his lips, and gleefully pours you a glass. And his strange claim is easy to believe. Especially since, as I have said before, the bottle declares in plain, block letters: SERGIO. It is his wine; it is, truly, in some mystic fashion, his spirit. It is his genius that has created it; he has poured his whole self, and the whole accrued stock of knowledge of the last hundred-and-something years of his family’s wine-making tradition, into crafting it in all its glorious inimitability.

I have known many an alcoholic, and in North America I think there are many alcoholics, and that, because, as I say, North Americans do not understand alcohol. To see an alcoholic drink is like seeing a man having an asthma attack, gasping for air and unable to force enough into his lungs. The drunkard drinks for the drink itself; his body craves the drink, and his sole end is to satisfy the thirst of his body. But the true drinker is concerned with something altogether different than that.

As we make our tour through the wine-making facility—or cantina as it is called—enjoying the varied and delicious wines, one of my fellow squires turns to me and mentions how strange it is that wine seems to have such a muted effect upon him here in Italy. All of us agree; we have noted the same effect. And certainly it is strange at first, but not, I think, entirely inexplicable.

This evident phenomenon, I would argue, is certainly not as a consequence of any lessened potency of the alcohol here. Rather it is a direct consequence of the fact that the act of drinking is here inextricably and always intertwined with greater things than the drink itself—with camaraderie, with tradition, with family, friendship, and yes, with religion. For there are two ways to treat a thing unjustly; one is by lifting it above its rank and worshipping it, and the other is by debasing it and treating it as a mere servant or slave when it is greater, both of which make us, and the thing, look foolish.

But in Italy wine is not as my North American connoisseur friends, or my alcoholic friends, have made it: as an end in itself. It is neither the deity nor the tyrannical slave. It is, rather, the happy, humble steward.

This is, after all the continent in which some of the finest liquors have been distilled and brewed and vinified by monks and priests. This is the continent on which once flourished the Catholic religion with all its love of the good things of this earth as gifts to Man and foretastes of the kingdom to come. I would like not to have to quote the oft-cited fact that Christ’s first miracle was the transformation of water into what, we are told, was a spectacular wine, but the fact is that those are the facts, and I think that they mean something. I think Christ knew what he was about when he did that. And I think that Europe, with its thousands of years of Catholic tradition, is, despite its reckless pursuit of its greatest apostasy yet, still steeped through and through, inescapably, with deep spiritual undercurrents that inform everything its inhabitants do.

Sitting about the dinner tables of the remarkable relations of Julian’s, savouring three-course meals that extend for two, three hours, or more, the wine, which flows abundantly and continually, is something other than alcohol. There is something spiritual about it, a deep river of tradition that informs its consumption, and there is something natural in its plentiful presence; in fact, I only really stop and take notice of it and ponder it because I am a writer, because it is my job and my vocation and my passion to notice things, and, better yet, to delve into their significances.

I feel that I could go on at much greater length about this topic yet. I believe in many ways it touches on some truly fundamental questions about the spirit of Europe, and especially Italy, the spirit with which I have had the chance to commune for the last month and a half. But alas, I am out of time, and probably long ago out of space.

Perhaps I shall end this segment with this significance. In the introduction to my last article I promised to delve into to the origins and the secrets of Julian, to try to come to some conclusion or explanation about the strange creature that is my roommate and my friend. And I think I have discovered something. I think I have discovered that, just as the effervescent wine fermented from prosecco grape flows through the veins of Sergio and Zia Pia, and all the others of Julian’s relatives, filling them with a passion for life that I have rarely, if ever encountered, so too has it made its way down through Julian’s parents and into the blood of Julian himself.

Julian’s heart pumps blood that is infused with the effervescent prosecco liquid and it bequeaths to him the sweet insanity so common here in the mystic town of Valdobiaddene.

(All comments, questions, concerns, personal insults or slurs pertaining to Ramblings from Rome may be e-mailed to John at jjalsevac@lifesite.net, or Julian at julesarts@hotmail.com. Again, John and Julian’s blog address is www.vestalmorons.blogspot.com)

St. Peters - 6:00AM Sunday

2005-10-26T18:08:00.000+02:00

What St. Peter's looks like at 6:00AM. I don't know why these panoramas load so small on blogger. Anyway, perhaps it's for the best; what with no tripod and all a few of the photos I stitched together are a little blurry.

Saturday's Traditional Race Around the Circus Maximus

2005-10-25T22:41:00.000+02:00

On the way to the traditional Circus Maximus race.

The start of the men's race.

The start of the women's race.

Dannilu takes the women's race despite being wrapped in a comforter...er...I mean toga.

The official coronation ceremony of the victors. Strangely enough, I think this is the first photo that I have posted of our dearly beloved Mr. and Mrs. Akers. For those Rome students who are considering the Rome program, I'm sure all us Romans can assure you that this beautiful couple is more than enough of a reason to come. Anyway, we will write much more about them in the future.

Julian's Rambler Article

2005-10-25T12:36:00.000+02:00

Swiss Cheese
By Remus

I woke up at 5:15 AM at the oppressive dictatorship of my alarm clock, but as the reign of passion had dethroned my reason, kicking it down the stairs in a heartless regicide, I stabbed the meddlesome clock in the dark, silencing the prophet and his admonitions, closing my eyes to its lifeless corpse to enjoy a day of quiet, to refuse such undue demands of penance. An unseen hour passed. I woke up again in a gasp, veering my eyes again to my advisor’s silenced pleas, seeing for the first time the error of my ways, but it was too late. He was dead.

“John,” I addressed, this time to my roommate, another advisor and moreover my master. “John. When were we suppose to wake up to go the Vatican?”

In lethargic resistance, similar to mine, with his head engulfed in a pillow, characteristic of Jalsevac’s sleeping posture, he answered in a muffled filter, “Uh ... 5:40.”

“Oh, no,” I noted, in peril seasoned with a pinch of despair. “It’s 7:15. We’re late. They’ve left without us.”

I can’t remember if I started to freak out or report this with an unnatural drone of indifference, though the subject dealt with serious matter for our experience as tourists, students, and Roman Catholics. The plan was to attend Mass at the Vatican, and then to tour its secret archives and gardens, a privilege somehow acquired for us by the graces of Mr. and Mrs. Akers, our generous teachers and deans. This gift, so exceptional and once-in-a-lifetime, now stood in danger of death.

John, knowing exactly what to do, said, “We better call them.” But then remembered: “Oh, they’re probably in Mass right now. Here’s the plan: we wake up, wait 20 minutes, and then call them on their cell phones.”

Passion still had its grip on the sceptre, and to my lips, these words came with such a fearful harmony of nature, it scares me now to think on, “Well, we could go back to sleep in the meantime.”

This made so much sense for some reason.

“We should probably get up and get ready to leave,” spoke logic, using John as His instrument, but alas, even the Jalsevacian, the demigod of motion and energy, a second later, fell victim to this beautiful slumbering seductress, even after issuing this protest so sound, so sane, but then so asleep.

Then I had a dream. I dreamt that I was with the rest of the group, gathered in tourist formation around a tomb in St. Peter’s. Mr. Akers was talking about it with great animation, while I took a good look around to see where they were. I turned to one of my classmates, Emma Fritcher, and asked her to tell me exactly where they were going to be and how to get there. Strangely, I knew full well that I was dreaming but pursued this experiment nevertheless. I wondered maybe, just maybe, through talking to Emma, though in a dream, somehow, in some way, I could actually get some fragment of a true answer, whether it happened by preternatural contact to her real self or by talking to her phantasm whom I really knew to be myself, by which by some dumb but lucky logic I might find out the true and helpful response.

But I knew the futility of this course of action even in my irrational unconsciousness and turned my attention to John who also stood in the group. “John,” I said, “This is just a dream. None of these people are real. This method is not going to work.” But even when I spoke these words to him, I knew in the back of my mind, that John wasn’t real either, and that made me sad. These mental clones gave me pleasant company, and I enjoyed talking to them, but I confessed finally to all of them that none of them existed.

Eventually, I abandoned the catacombs of sleep.

Forty-five minutes later, reason, as violent, and vengeful as it was in the French Revolution, took up arms and overthrew the long oppression of the appetites and roused us from our beds – John first, and I second. We phoned the Akers, who, as we had planned, were right in the middle of Mass, threw on some purposeful accouterments, and charged out the hotel, stopping only for breakfast and coffee. This preparation heroically took only forty-five minutes.

In haste, did we reach our destination by underground railway, arriving without cell-phone or clue what to do next at St. Peter’s Piazza. We had to regroup with our class already stationed somewhere in the Basilica, but as this is the largest church in the entire known universe, we needed further contact with them before our assault commenced.

We consulted pay phones to contact the lost souls of our group. We bribed the machine with coins and told it the numeric names of the desired individuals. But as this was the first time John and I had employed such foreign diviners of telecommunication, misunderstandings arose, and continuous failures to conjure up the desired cell phones dampened our efforts as well as our own spirits. The telephonic mediums had high prices and did not refund us in their failures, and pocket change was running low. Suddenly, providence put to death these pagan pan-handling practices, and a man accidentally walked off without his phone card. Seeing it thus abandoned, we adopted it as our own, figured out the problem, and made contact with the spirit of Mr. Akers without fear of bankruptcy. To our dismay, the group had already passed through the Secret Archives of the Vatican and were now walking the gardens. Though he told us where he and the rest now resided, he could not tell us how we could enter there ourselves, as it required special escort which was no longer available to us. We thanked him, hung up, and went forth.

Passing through metal detectors, armed guards, and occasional Swiss guards, we approached a non-threatening kind of worker and asked him in clear diction, “How do you get in to the Vatican gardens?” The man, a peon of the Basilica, looked at us as if we were clinically insane. “Vatican gardens forbidden,” said he in accents and gestures Italian, “You cannot go. Impossible.” With an Italian gesture of our own, fashioned to function like a Jedi mind trick as well, we told him the plain truth that we had a group already in there, which we were suppose to join. As he had as much authority in the Vatican as a Doric Column, he told us to walk to the other side of the Basilica and plead our case to the Swiss Guard.

As the strangely clad guard was without his trusty spear at the moment, we approached him confidently, and explained our desire to enter upon the Vatican gardens. He looked at us as if we were clinically insane. But with little effort in explaining further our plight, he let us pass with surprising ease. It was too easy. We knew somewhere deep down that the weasely French guy from the airport would pop up suddenly and have us guillotined. So far, however, it looked good.

Jalsevac and I crept inconspicuously behind the Basilica, passing by guards and officials with an air of confident but low-key strides. Then, a guard with a gun stopped us, and asked us what the heck we were doing. We said that we intended access to the papal gardens, which sparked a look, this time, that suspected severe clinical insanity, finished with a quick and nervous laugh of disbelief. It was the highlight of his day no doubt. He told us to go no further as he called security. And so we did.

After a few minutes of self-controlled anxiety, he put the telephone down and surprisingly asked us, “Is the head man of your group named ‘Akers?’” We decided to tell the truth and say yes. This satisfied him. He hung up, shrugged, smiled, and motioned us toward the vast expanse of greenery that lay before us. No problem, we thought.

We literally searched the entire country, one end to another.

The Vatican, however, is luckily the smallest country in the world, although much bigger than I thought. I thought it only consisted of the Piazza and the Basilica and maybe some apartment buildings. Nope, that’s only about a fifth of it. We walked through the gardens of the Vatican, lost in this paradisal labyrinth where no soul accompanied us, alone in the papal trees and fountains where numerous Popes had passed in silent meditation. We had infiltrated the Vatican and no one was there. How did this happen? These people are suppose to protect the Pope but we just walked right in. We suspected Vatican snipers watching our every move.

Somehow, we found our group, and strutted manfully down the sidewalk in triumphal glory. We spoke how the Swiss Guards were after us, and how we made Swiss Cheese out of some of them in order to get in. But we were there. A bit late, yes, for sinful passion got the better of us at first, but we repented, we had fought, and we had arrived in the gardens of the Church.

Two Poems

2005-10-23T18:58:00.000+02:00

In Subiaco

Within the world of men there are
(Or so the rumour goes)
Some men who love the motorcar
The way its fuel explodes
The angry pistons’ rumbling
The screech of spinning tires
And smoke and flame and bubbling
Combustion’s fumes and fires.

Of others yet I have been told
Who fly into a rage
At mention of the things of old.
The prophet and the sage
They’ll bind and flog and crucify
Within the marketplace
And all the while they’ll shriek and sigh
And curse the fickle fates.

With these I’ll hold no concourse now
Perhaps some other time
For now I’ll bend my head, and bow,
I’ll not commit the crime
Of shallow men, of hollow men
Of men who desecrate
The dead they cannot understand
Who can but curse the fates.

Here is a silence, and a peace
We cannot replicate.
Our music our motorcars
Cannot approximate.
For all this blessed hallowed ground
Once looked upon the face
The silent boy whose searching found
Our God within a cave.

These ancient stones I’ll lean against
I’ll smoke a quiet pipe
I’ll close my book, put down my pens
And bask within the light,
The double warmth, of sun and Son,
Joint guardians of these graves
And marvel that the greater one
Was found within a cave.

A Translation of a 16th Century Inscription on St. Benedict's Cave

Lumina si quaeris, Benedicte. Quid elegis antra?
Quaesite servant luminis antra nihit
Sed perge in tenebris radiorum quaerer lucem:
Nonmisi ab obscura sidera nocte micant.

If you are searching for the light
Why do you choose the darkened cave?
The cave shall never offer you
The light for which you crave.

But, Benedict, stay in your cave
Keep searching for that shining light
For stars, they never shine above
But in the midst of blackest night.

Pilgrimage to the Monasteries of Sts. Scholastica and Benedict

2005-10-22T10:29:00.000+02:00

In the town of Subiaco, home of the papacy's former summer residence, the ruins of Nero's giant villa, and the monasteries of Benedict and Scholastica, and ten others, we came upon this unexpected place of worship. The headquarters (or maybe midquarters or footquarters) of the Communist Party. I think the party's office workers were slightly taken aback at the evident glee this find caused our entire group of thirty students.

Walking the steps that lead from the bottom of the mountain up to the monastery of St. Scholastica, and then, a couple thousand steps beyond this first place of meditation, that monastery named after her famous brother, St. Benedict. At the head of this group is our beloved Dublin-native chaplain, Fr. Mark.

Halfway up the mountain. Subiaco is laid out before us, built at the base of, and all the way up a mountain, the whole amazing thing culminates in the fortress of the papacy's ancient and now abandoned summer residence.

Leaving the monastery of St. Scholastica.

The monastery of St. Benedict. The whole fortress-like building is built on the edge of a cliff that houses the famous network of caves, and especially the one cave, where Benedict spent three completely solitary years in meditation and prayer, unknown to anyone but for one man who every day lowered a basket of bread into his cave. The network of caves has since been turned into a intricate series of chapels and frescoes that wind down four or five levels.

Monastery of St. Benedict.

The cave where Benedict spent those three years.

2005-10-19T13:39:00.000+02:00

At today's audience.

2005-10-19T13:38:00.000+02:00

The Mouth of Truth. Legend has it that if you tell a lie and stick your hand in its mouth it will bite you. Apparently Julian is just so full of falsehood that it has even seeped into his very clothing. He did not win this battle for his sweater.

2005-10-15T00:02:00.000+02:00

Julian's family. Now our adopted Italian family as well. Generous beyond belief, welcoming beyond understanding, and a heck of a lot of fun.

2005-10-14T23:40:00.000+02:00

What can one say to this? The photo stands alone.

The kings of pigeanity.

In Venice,

In Venice

The cover of their next album. Just as soon as they learn to play some instruments. Here we are some many thousand feet above sea level. It was cold, very cold. And if it weren't for the mist Venice should have been distinctly visible about 60 kilometers to the East.

Halfway up the cross, what may look like clouds are not clouds, but are the Alps. I won't try to describe them; go there and you'll know for yourself.

Looking out over Valdobbiadene.

Drinking wine straight from 30,000 liter tanks is not an experience to be lightly passed over.

Mine and Geoff's adopted Italian family. Two of the loveliest, kindest, most generous people I have ever had the pleasure to meet.

The view from the room at the house where Geoff and I stayed. It looks East, straight towards the Meditteranean, looking out over the entire valley of towns and villages and how many thousands of vineyards. And so many dozen Church spires along its length.

In Class in Rome

2005-10-14T22:51:00.000+02:00

In Class in Rome
By Romulus

Something of the Renaissance
Is on that page, inside this book.
Such lovely, lifelike lines, you see?
You’d like it if you’d only look.

Across the flowing Tiber
Begins to swing a booming bell
As if to say; “Here is the spot
Where wept the painter, Raphael.”

The voice drones on
I think to yell:
Why don’t you show
Instead of tell!

The Land of Milk and Honey (and Wine)

2005-10-12T11:42:00.000+02:00

Ramblings from Rome

The Land of Milk and Honey (and Wine)
(Part I?)

By Romulus for The Rambler

I once had the pleasure of corresponding with my roommate’s father. In conducting the little literary business at hand (he has something or other to do with the American Chesterton Society) we exchanged a few e-mails between the two of us. At the end of our correspondence I found it fit to complement Mr. Ahlquist on producing a son of the sort as Julian, who has become a great friend of mine in the last year and a half, and with whom I am most sorry you freshmen have not have the pleasure of making an acquaintance.

And then, as I drew towards that spot in my final bit of correspondence, the point where one traditionally affixes one’s name beneath one or another courteous phrase, I paused, and I thought a bit. I thought to myself that it is certainly a time-tested truism, a truism sadly forgotten in the West, that a knowledge of the origins of a man contribute much to the knowledge of who, exactly, he is. I asked myself who Aeneas would be without Troy; who Alexander without Aristotle; who Augustine without Monica. And in the face of this argument I yielded. I confessed to Mr. Ahlquist, in the faint, glimmering hope of a solution, my bewilderment over what sort of family and father could and would produce such a thoroughly odd, yet oddly venerable creature as Julian.

Mr. Ahlquist responded graciously. For my compliments on his eldest and heir he thanked me. And then he firmly disassociated himself from any responsibility whatsoever, concurred that Julian was a through and through enigma, and then added the terrifying suffix that if I thought Julian was strange, I should try meeting his father.

At first I suspected something of paternal pride, the sort that leads a father to believe that his own son won’t and can’t surpass him, who has always been the teacher and not the taught. But now I confess that I’m not so sure; the rug has, as the saying goes, been pulled out from under my feet.

For while sitting in a Valdobbiadene pizzeria two nights ago, at a table overflowing with Julian’s relations, a very strange and unexpected thing happened. Julian, the best friend who still appears to me as a mythical creature with two heads, with a laugh as strange and mysterious as the shape of the platypus, and as large in life as any colossus, was suddenly transformed before my eyes into something as complacent and sane as any man ever was; while any number of those whose blood he shares grew ever larger and expanded until the room seemed quite unable to contain them.

But I see I am starting all wrong.

* * *

One not particularly fine October morning four young, impetuous squires struck out from the Eternal City in search of adventure. The names of my protagonists are squires Giuliano (Julian Ahlquist), Geoffredo (Geoff Turecek), Adamo (Adam Wilson) , and Giovanni (me). For this embryonic plot-line it is true I take no credit. It is the creation of one of my fellow squires. If I recall correctly my fellow squire told this imaginative and imaginatively apt version of our story to me as we drove through a particularly verdurous valley in search of particularly good wine and good company in a Northern Italian town whose name I cannot now recall. Our hostess and driver at the time was the natural heroine of such a romance; a fair and lovely native who we calculated after some measure of violent debate and any number of relational algorithms to be the third cousin of Julian’s, and who added just that aspect of believability to the claim of medievalism of my fellow adventurer.

On this October morning these four squires of a strange diversity and varied skills (bow-staff skills, computer hacking skills, numchaku skills) clambered on the back of a colossal, armoured serpent that they found awaiting their command; it awaited silently, there in between the basilicas and towering pagan monuments of The City. At our bidding it bucked and writhed its way for four and a half hours (or what seemed as many days) across the mountains and plains and through the valleys and rivers of the land called Italia.

All the while above our four heroes hung an ominous table of mist that encircled and strangled the mountains called the Apennines; it swallowed their peaks in an impenetrable and mysterious shroud. Under this table they sped, in frantic haste towards they knew not what, but that it was unknown and new and exciting.

Great rivers were as tiny rivulets to their metallic monster. Foreign towns and villages flew past their astonished vision in a haze; towns of plaster and stucco and brick that squatted on top of hills, crowded buildings huddling together, seeking warmth and comfort amidst the eerie landscape, as though overcome by a nightmare memory of the Gauls and the Visigoths whose spear-prickled armies had once marched by their feet in search of blood; towns with church spires penetrating through the table of mist that seemed less like mist and more like an entire seething ocean suspended just above the surface of earth by an inexplicable act of black magic or impossible providence.

And to the squires all of this, with all its heavy gloominess, was better than a midday sun and blue skies, for it spoke of witches and dragons, and such evil things to be slain, and ideals and damsels to be fought for.

And when at last the mist was suddenly lifted they came to what is called the sea; and they saw it shine like a jewel of great promise, blue and sparkling. When saw they could go no further, and the beast would not swim, they dismounted. A signpost told them that they had entered the province of Venezia.

Then one of the four squires looked to the East, towards the sea, and then he looked to the West and the setting sun, his eyes following the straight, deep valley that furrows swiftly towards the Alpine mountains, and he said: “Here is my home. Here live my flesh and my blood.” And it was true. For a man called Lorenzo stood at the spot where the four seekers-after-adventure dismounted from their metallic serpent, as though he had prophesied their arrival, and he looked at the one squire who had spoken, and he said “you are my nephew.” And that too was perfectly true. The two embraced then as the uncle and nephew that they were.

Now, a very wise and prophetic man by the name of Gilbert Keith, in whose hands language was always as a wizard’s staff, once said that he hoped “that the four rivers of Eden were milk, water, wine, and ale.”

With him I agree very much; and now it strikes me that perhaps we four happy squires have now felt beneath our feet the moist, rich earth of Eden. For though I have seen many a river of water, I had never before known a river of milk or ale, and certainly not so divine a thing as a river of wine. But in this land of Treviso, bordering on the province of Venezia, guarded on one side by the Alps on another by the Mediterranean, in which floats a whole city, magically suspended on water; there, in the town of Valdobbiadene, I first encountered a river of wine. For, you see, if you can believe it, wine of the highest quality flows in the town of Valdobbiadene as abundantly as water, perhaps even more abundantly.

But that is certainly not the end of the story; for of wine there are infinite varieties, of various qualities, brewed according to various secret, strict, monkish recipes, and in spite of which each brew assumes new and unexpected qualities with each coming year. Yet, of the infinite varieties of wine flowing between the banks of Eden’s most refined of the four rivers, it seems to me that God would have at least fretted and paused over the possibility of pouring forth a deluge of that wine that is squeezed from the juice of Prosecco grapes. And that is exactly the wine that is produced in abundance in Valdobbiadene. It is the wine brewed in its finest form by a jovial, inexplicable man by the name of Sergio Mionetto, whose spirit is so much like that of the wine he brews that a certain brand of it bears his own name.

Of him, and others, I will have more to say later.

The Re-Annexation of Innocence

2005-10-05T07:07:00.000+02:00

The Re-Annexation of Innocence
By Romulus

For The Rambler

It had been my intention to write this week about my adventures of this past weekend, immersed in the glories of the island of Ischia, just off the Western coast of Southern Italy. But the day here in Rome has been cold, and rainy, and dreary. And I have spent it in bed, suffering the pains of a particularly unusual, and particularly painful headache.

Further, today as I lay tossing and turning in my bed it happened, as is often the case in illness, that certain current anxieties appeared to me magnified and vividly. I woke several times from terrifying dreams, and found myself unable to return to sleep. And with the specter of several tests looming over my head, and the obligation of composing an article before the end of the night, the sand and the sun and the blue sea of Ischia seem as a distant, and not very believable dream.

Thus are my thoughts unable to focus on Ischia long enough to translate the beauty of the reality to the art of writing in any worthy fashion. And rather than the beauty of Mediterranean islands, I instead find myself thinking a lot about the beauty of St. Francis of Assisi, which strikes me as much more appropriate, and a whole lot more comforting. So I will write a little, a very little, about him.

As I sit down to write the sun is just setting on his feast day. I have just returned to my room after attending Mass in the chapel of the half religious house, half hotel where we Romans live out our days and do (or, as is more common, not do) our studies. The celebrant, a priest originally from Dublin, delivered a quiet, penetrating, peaceful homily on St. Francis, and I am afraid that the best I can do is to do my best to plagiarize a little of it.

I am only sorry that whatever I do I will not be able to do it with anything of the quiet joy, and the sly smile that perpetually emanates from out our already beloved chaplain’s youthful face. Perhaps the good father did not know it, but as he spoke of the joy and the innocence of Francis, his words were only a secondary lesson to his own sparkling eyes and gently laughing self. And that right there, I might as well note, in all its wordless simplicity, is already found one of the profoundest lessons one can take from the life of the Assisian saint.

“Though he only ever slept on a wooden board,” said Father in his homily, during which he must have made us all laugh a dozen times, “St. Francis always slept like a baby. And we, with our electric blankets, and giant pillows, and feather beds, we find ourselves unable to sleep, because of all of our anxieties.” After a day like today that struck home.

Perhaps, indeed, at some time the question has tormented you, as it has me, of whether or not it is possible to regain one’s innocence. I have long thought about the question, but been unable to resolve it in my own life; because, despite my burning desire for the peaceful, quiet rest of the innocent, I don’t think I’ve ever truly known it. Perhaps as a child I did; but I don’t recall that, so it hardly counts.

True, I have sometimes known tastes or grasped at hints of such a preternatural state; sometimes following a good and particularly needed confession, and at others in the mere contemplation of something good and beautiful like a sunset or the face or voice of a loved one. But the poison buried in the mind of a sinner inevitably oozes through to the surface again, and one is aware of the presence in oneself of something dirty and dark and sickly and undesirable. The desire to wash it off is sometimes there, but one is unsure of how, or what soap will ever do to scrub away such a stubborn filth.

It has often been easy to give in to the despair of our age which, besides saying that innocence of this sort isn’t a thing to be desired in the first place, further twists the knife in the heart of hope by telling us that even if it were, innocence of the kind for which I yearn isn’t at all possible. I of course find it very strange that the same age that tells me I am divine, and that I can do whatever my heart pleases, qualifies by saying that on second thought the one thing I can’t do is that--the one thing that my heart truly pleases with a tearful fervour.

But in my greatest moments of clarity I know it has often been easy to believe these things only because it is in this age that I am immersed; it has been easy to believe because we humans have terrible memories.

St. Francis is, I suppose, something different for every age. As Father said in his homily, St. Francis is everything to everybody; everything and everybody was his brother, from all of humanity, individually, to brother wolf and the birds and the moon and the sun. But for our age, the age that has disbelieved in innocence itself, the joyful saint is most of all a reminder that innocence is truly good, and desirable, and best of all, possible. For it is clear St. Francis wasn’t always innocent, but that by the time he died he most certainly was to an extraordinary and unbelievable degree, and that, therefore, at some point he must have become so from not being so. It is clear that he very well knew sin and its insidious and poisonous and dirty pride, and that it was really only after that day when he walked out of his house, and shed all of the finery, all of the silks and fabrics of his father’s that he wore, and claimed God in Heaven as his Father, and unabashedly embraced the lepers and Sister Poverty in the perfect act of conversion, that he washed himself clean and knew innocence.

That, I repeat, is the one lesson that the modern man studying the life of Francis ought to walk away with: innocence, which every man at some time or another knows he wants more than anything in the world, may be regained.

“In Assisi,” said Father, “even the buildings give off this sense of innocence. It is everywhere in the whole town.” And that is good and exciting to hear, because we are slated to have a three or four day retreat in Assisi later this semester, that I am greatly looking forward to.

In asking how this miracle came about, it is obvious that the innocence of Francis could only have been a result of the fact that in nearly every way he imitated and became and was another Christ. So much so was he another Christ that he became the first known saint in history to bear the marks of the stigmata.

Perhaps my favourite passage from all of scripture is the opening of the book of Job. God has allowed Satan to take away so much of what is precious to Job, so the faithful man falls on his knees, sprinkles himself with ashes and prays: “Naked I came from my mothers womb / naked shall I return. / Yahweh giveth, and Yahweh taketh away / Blessed be the name of Yahweh!”

Being a Catholic and averse to Scripture I never read the book of Job until some time in the last two years. But I will always remember the feeling that washed over me when I read that profound and unexpected and impassioned cry of faith, such that tears sprung to my eyes. This cry that erupted from the depths of Job’s soul, that flies in the face of all of the logic of the world, was, I knew, exactly the sort of childish faith that Christ talked about in the Gospels, when he encouraged men to be like little children. This truth touches something so fundamental in the soul that it cannot possibly be described, only experienced.

It is interesting then, that, just as Christ entered the world as a lesson in and as a fulfillment of these words of Job, naked in the manger, and exited it in the same way, naked on the cross, so too did St. Francis enter and leave this world, free from attachment to all things but the Creator of all things.

It is told that when he knew he was going to die, St. Francis removed his robe, and lay on the floor, curled up like a baby, naked and happy and peaceful and ready for the hands of Sister Death to take him into the embrace of his bride and the loving gaze of his Father. And in some mystical fashion, he did so nailed to the cross with Christ, with the marks of the stigmata still on his body.

Francis died innocent and happy and free.

Here, it is so undeniably clear to any man with any vestige of moral vision left, was a man who was free. Of course, I think that that is why St. Francis is so popular, because most people do have the vestige of a moral vision left; they recognize and thirst for his freedom. It is true, though, that so many, or rather all, of the saints are lessons in freedom; but the simple truth is that it was so exactly purified in the case of St. Francis.

As is usually a good rule of thumb when one feels that one hasn’t expressed one’s topic well, in the least, I close with a quote by Chesterton that I’m not sure directly relates to what I have said, but that I love very much:

“The whole point about St. Francis of Assisi is that he certainly was ascetical and he certainly was not gloomy… It was not self-denial merely in the sense of self-control. It was as positive as a passion; it had all the air of being as positive as a pleasure. He devoured fasting as a man devours food. He plunged after poverty as men have dug madly for gold.”

2005-10-03T18:48:00.001+02:00

Ischia. Need I say more?

The Perfect Weekend

2005-10-03T18:46:00.000+02:00

In what can only be described as the perfect weekend, we somehow found a hostel that was more akin to a private house than anything. Internet access, fully equipped kitchens, and a lovely balcony that looked out over the city of Forio, on the Western side of the island.

My birthday dinner. The girls made an absolutely splendid dinner with all the trimmings. And a cake at the end, which was very thoughtful.

The rich colours of sunset, with Caitlyn and Emma leaning on the railings of the balcony of our hostel.

Nobody could possibly ever believe what it is like to be driven through the "streets" (and I use the term loosely) of Forio on the island of Ischia, by a twenty-two year old Italian who has lived there all his life, and knows the streets much, much better than he knows the back of his hand. This is how wide the streets were. And there is a 90 degree turn to be navigated just behind our backs. Now do that in the pitch black, at thirty-five miles an hour.

Italians are crazy, but do they ever know how to drive.

Our poor, poor bursers. One with two years of engineering under her belt, and the other with a purported high-school calculus credit. They did good work. I take this moment to thank them very, very much for their good work.

Arguably the highlight of our weekend was travelling to the very top of the mountain that is the volcanic island of Ischia. There we encountered Restaurant Olimpi, with a breath-taking view of the whole of Ischia, the Mediterranean, and surounding islands. 5 Euro each for a giant bowl of homegrown, home-made pasta, and another 5 Euro for a litre of delicious local red wine.

Even for us it is difficult to believe that it is real, and that we were just there this past weekend.

Oh well. Two less mouths to feed.

The whole group of us, with one of the two brothers (Lorenzo...Emma's sweetheart....or was that Giuseppe?-one can hardly keep track of them) who ran the hostel with their mother and father and grandparents. Four generations of their family had lived on the island making wine and running a hotel. Mamma makes rather good food.

The Journey To Ischia

2005-10-03T18:43:00.000+02:00

The bus-station in Naples. Alright, so it's not that exciting. Unless of course you take into consideration the fact that this is Naples, in the South of Italy, sitting comfortably on the Mediterranean. Then I suppose it's a little exciting. Anyway, it is for all of us. We enjoyed it.

In actual fact, we always knew precisely where we were going at all times. Unless, of course, we didn't. But other than that...

The portent that we encountered minutes after leaving the port at Naples, clearly proving that God favoured our journey. And considering how unbelievably well the weekend worked out, in every possible way, that's not too much of a stretch really.

We encountered some rain on Friday. But it was actually quite lovely. And the following day we had pretty much cloudless skies and everything else that could possibly make Ischia as beautiful as possible.

2005-09-29T19:29:00.000+02:00

View from the roof of Casa Lasalle a few nights back.

Sufer Culture in Rome

2005-09-29T14:27:00.000+02:00

Surfer Culture And The Mystery of Rome

By Julian Ahlquist

An Italian legend, so I’ve learned, says that Rome has a secret name. “Roma” is a mere alias used for public discourse ... as well, on a side note, “Amor” spelt backwards, interestingly (which explains a lot of interesting things I’ve seen in the public areas so far that ought not be public usually). Romulus shrouded its real identity in mystery so that its enemies, not knowing its name, would be unable to bring curses upon it ... or something to that effect. Consequently, it is a great sacrilege to speak the real name of Rome, though no one knows what it is, except the Pontifex Maximus.

I’ve embarked on the quest to find that name. The Pontifex Maximus, even though he’s the Pope right now, should really have someone on the side who knows the name too, just in case. Also, I am dying to know. Accusations may come in condemnation of my efforts, but I argue that my mission does not profane the Eternal City, for it is obvious that I will fail in a futile and spectacularly pathetic and humorous attempt. Further, it would be neat to know and perhaps lend the key to understanding this strange place known as Rome.

Rome has been an Empire, a City-State, a Religious Center, the Symbol of an ideal existence. It’s a kind of amorphous, ethereal beast that no one can figure out, but one that has conquered the world.

I can’t figure out the Italian people either. I’m partially Italian, but that probably just makes things worse. At first, I was repelled by their apparent and blatantly obvious lack of sanity. It can be foremost recognized on their streets by the way they operate cars. They seem to want to kill people when they get angry, but they always just come short of it. It is an emotionally hot culture but not violent in the least. They scream at each other but never throw punches. Italy’s appearance is operatic, dramatic, theatrical but not real. The true reality is hidden somewhere else.

This mysterious beauty I’ve witnessed all throughout Rome, from its Roman temples to its Italian tongue. The Pantheon and the Basilicas make one ask the question how on earth could such a thing be built. Modern architects are baffled. They are beautiful and mysterious. Italian language shares the same. It has a strategic use of vowels and consonants that brings forth the maximum amount of pleasure to the listener (and this certainly contributes to the interesting things that happen in public areas, as mentioned above). There are mysteries sown into their speech as well. Most of it makes sense, but some things are quite weird.

“Prego” is an Italian word that wears a veil of secrecy. Italians say it all the time, but no one knows what the heck it means. Americans have heard it from the Pasta Sauce. According to our textbook, it means “to pray” or “to beg” or “you’re welcome,” but that’s mere tomfoolery. It doesn’t mean anything, and it also means everything, or something in between those two. Italians speak it with a fearsome liberality amongst their turbulent fast-talking seas of nonsense. Linguists can try their best to unsheathe its meaning, but this, I fear, is a futile gesture. It shall remain a lexical mystery in the land of grapes and olives ... and love.

I, however, may have found its English clone a few days ago, and I believe it’s “Dude.”

The word “Dude” is surely the most versatile word in the English language. “Dude” can be shaped into various masterpieces of expression by the mere inflection of one’s voice. One can adopt it for interjectional shock: “Dude!”; or while nodding unconsciously to another’s incoherence, “Dude”; or for a strange interrogative, “Dude?” Or for manifesting a content, relaxing sigh, “Duuude.” The religious sister who is teaching us the Italian language has attested to the ambiguity of “Prego.” And thus, I think it can be said, Prego is Dude.

At breakfast, this word came in handy. Upon reaching the cereals, I failed to infuse a pitcher of milk into a bowl of granola, and delivered the dairy onto the nice table cloth instead. Embarrassed by this lactose misdemeanor, I glanced nervously around and found the Italian-speaking nun standing right next to me, as well as an opportunity to redeem myself with a keen use of Italian linguistics. “Prego!” I said to the spillage, pointing to it condemningly, as I looked to the nun for her professorial approval. She shook her head despairingly and said that even with the forgiving, ecumenical use of that word, somehow I still had managed to use it badly. She recommended, “Ecco” instead, which means, “Here it is!” Under holy obedience, I contemplated these things in my heart and paid no attention to when I tried to pour the milk again, and poured it onto the table for a second time. “Prego!” I said again and wondered why I was so stupid.

Nonetheless, I acted rightly. To cloak one’s stupidity, one must publicize it. It is counter-intuitive and deceptive. The best way to hide something is to make it obvious. This, I think, is what Romulus has done with the name of his city. He has hidden it in the Italian language. He has disguised it as something that looks like itself. I have fancied that Rome’s name might be “Prego.”

Tomorrow's (Highly Unsatisfactory) Rambler Article

2005-09-27T23:53:00.000+02:00

This Journey Towards Elysium

By Romulus

For Christendom's The Rambler

<>Rome took all the vanity out of me; for after seeing the wonders there, I felt too insignificant to live, and gave up all my foolish hopes in despair.
- Louisa May Alcott in Little Women (1869)

The great folly of the anticipation of travel, especially for the young and the inexperienced, is that one is so unsure of what to anticipate. Many prospective and youthful wayfarers will, in the time leading up to their departure to the unknown, dream away their days in idle and ill-informed excitement, conjuring forth a stream of phantasms of this or that distant and exotic land and all without any sense at all for the soul—or, in many cases, the most basic geography—of the place to which their aircraft is set to carry them.

In many cases their ignorance naturally leads them—as human nature is wont to do—to create idealizations and expectations that have more in common with all the promises of our fore-fathers pertaining to the pleasures of Paradise than with anything earthly. Many are captured by this hope—one of the most ancient of dreams found weaving its amorphous way through the collective soul of Man—that the moment the soil of the earth has fallen away beneath our feet, that in that moment we will also have left behind all pain, all boredom, all confusion, all worries…all things human; and it so often leads to the devastating folly of Icarus.

Before boarding the plane for Rome I conscientiously forbade myself from anticipating the Eternal City. I have been burned by this particular flame before and wouldn’t be burned again; I have given in to the folly of holding distant lands to standards that no place on earth was ever meant to meet—except for that long forgotten Garden—and when they failed to measure up, as they are bound to, I met the sickly specter Disappointment.

So whenever anyone asked me of my coming journey (and many, many did) “are you excited?”, I could only tell them, in all honesty: “No.” I couldn’t be bothered. What would be would be, and this time I would patiently wait to see what would be.

But being a dreamer by nature I was only able to suppress the natural response of Man to the unknown for so long; especially such an unknown as Rome. And so, halfway through the six hour flight that would land in Paris I woke from a nap, and found to my shock that I was no longer in the same craft that had roared so violently off the tarmac at Dulles in Washington in the District of Columbia in the United States of America in the continent of North America on the spinning planet Earth, so many hours before.

Most all of the lights on the interior plane had been extinguished; outside the tiny windows of the cabin everything was black, and everything inside the cabin was cast in an eerie, unearthly glow; everything was suffused with the heavy weight of the restless sleep of the two hundred semi-divine wayfarers, while the craft (whatever exactly it was) itself vibrated so very faintly with the strange hum of mechanized flight that has nothing at all in common with the progress of any of the trains or automobiles or traveling beasts that are chained to the sandpaper surface of the globe.

Without really thinking about it, or stopping to choose words, or to ask what on earth I was going to write, I flipped open the notebook that I had solemnly dedicated to my travels and swiftly wrote (and I quote):

“…I am no longer on any of the terrestrial crafts of men. Now I find that am a passenger on a spaceship that is shooting haphazardly through the darkness of the cosmos; I am on a journey to a world that is beyond my understanding of the nature of the universe. Perhaps, I suspect, we aren’t even in the universe anymore, but are passengers on the craft of the Great Divorce, speeding through God knows what to God knows where –but not France, not Paris; anything but there. Something immeasurably greater; something ethereal, a little dark, at least to our understanding – and that is why we sit so silently in our seats, staring straight ahead, not caring to talk to our neighbour, not when we have within our minds, when we carry in our imaginations this precious treasure, this image of the Elysium that this celestial craft is destined toward.

“It is no matter if the image is false – it is not the particulars of these haunting dreams that are the manna of the mind, but rather it is the unknown wonder that await us, the peace and the happiness that we can be sure are at the end of this journey, in whatever form they should take. So much the better if it is all unlike anything we can think of; so much the better if it surpasses the phantasms of our minds, those images that are at best only extensions of the images of the earth, after all.

“It is only a trick of the imagination of course. For I know that when we land we will land in a city, the stones of which have been cut and placed by the hands of men. And in that city men will awake in tears and will live out their days in sorrow; and there is yet another spot on earth “where men sit and hear each other groan” and “ but to think is to be full of sorrow” .

“And yet, it is so much more than a trick of the imagination, is infinitely much more. All along I know that it is not just a dream, but a memory and a foretaste. If you look hard enough the sweet—the now bittersweet—taste of Heaven lingers in the air all around us; Heaven suffuses everything with its odour. Dare (and you must dare) to touch it, taste it with the tip of your tongue and you will never ever forget; you will always, always know that the prize at the end of the road is far to great to pass up; not for life, not for anything.”

Tonight I stood on the roof of Casa La Salle (the hotel where we reside). It is against the rules, but I appeal to the theological loophole of penal law; plus, I was alone, and silent, and very unlikely to cause a ruckus. I stood watching a distant fireworks show glimmering to the East over the sparkling silhouettes of pines and palms and apartment blocks, and over above St. Peter’s and the Coliseum and the breath-taking basilicas that are the pillars that keep Rome standing; everything was silhouetted in flickering gold and silver (and this so soon after the great fireball of the setting sun had painted everything with a fluorescent brush). It looked and sounded like a battlefield.

<>Being in a reflective mood I thought of many things. Much of what I thought centered on
the unexpected, breath-taking realization that absolutely everything here in the Eternal City has surpassed all my expectations.

“Everyone who has gone to Rome before you has come back changed,” she said to me before I left. I didn’t believe it though. What business does a place, just another spot on the surface of this earth, filled with men and their sins, have in changing a man? What place on earth has the power to do that?

The answer, I have found, is none at all. But Heaven certainly does. And in Rome most of all, all of the glory to be found in the final, eternal Kingdom descends in one giant column of flame and touches the plane of Man; and at the very center of that flame is St. Peter’s, and from that epicenter it spreads out in an inferno that is constantly kindling every part of the globe in this divine conflagration. Throw as much water on it as you will, it is but a drop in an ocean.

Heaven, it is so very clear from this, the tallest tower on Earth, is nothing less than inevitable; and that, I believe, is the source of all of the hope and comfort of our Faith.

(As always, comments, questions, or concerns about “Ramblings from Rome” may be e-mailed to: John Jalsevac – jjalsevac@lifesite.net, or Julian Ahlquist – julesarts@hotmail.com. Julian and John also have a joint weblog full of pictures of our adventures and many other such jolly things: www.vestalmorons.blogspot.com)

Required Viewing For the Day

2005-09-25T18:57:00.000+02:00

Alright, it's got absolutely nothing to do with Rome. Just watch it anyway and stop your whining.

http://www.bigad.com.au/

Link courtesy of Julian (Remus).

2005-09-24T23:34:00.000+02:00

Multiply this 50X, and you get a sense of the breadth of the excavations of Ostia Antica. The whole purpose is to give some sense of how an ancient city would be laid out. And it gives a very good sense of exactly that. Photo: Danni Ampi

2005-09-24T23:17:00.000+02:00

Julian doing deep things outside San Pudentia basilica. Unfortunately I cannot take credit for this beautiful shot with its lovely earth-tones. The credit goes quite thoroughly to Danni Ampi.

2005-09-24T22:49:00.000+02:00

A portion (2/3s) of the BC dated amphitheatre located in the ancient city of Ostia Antica where Christina Matatics and I today performed the scene of the confrontation between Ophelia and Hamlet. It was a truly lovely experience, and both of us were quite amazed at how easy it was to get into character in the broad daylight in public and on the stage of an ancient theatre. The acoustics were brilliant. Unfortunately, for reasons that I cannot ascertain, the entire panoramic shot did not work out. I am disappointed.

Christina and I running through our lines before performance time. Photo: Danni Ampi.

The performance. The stage was, well, a little larger than Little Washington.

2005-09-24T21:00:00.000+02:00

John's Unofficial Trip Position: Photographer to the photographers.
Where: Ostia Antica
Famous Why?: A massive (truly) complex of uncovered largelyBC built ruins, Ostia Antica is particularly famous for being the spot where St. Augustine conversed with his mother St. Monica in what is arguably the most mystical and beautiful passage of The Confessions. St. Monica would die shortly thereafter. We read that passage of the confessions today at that precise spot of Ostia.
Who is in this photo?: Front: Dannilu. Middle: Monica. Far back: Angela
What are they all taking photos of?: A complicated question. Angela was taking photos of Dannilu and Monica who were taking photos of Danni Ampi, who was up top taking photos of them, while I took photos of all three of them. Confused yet? I am. I suppose the saddest (or best, depending on your outlook) part of this is that this was not staged.

Danni Ampi's picture of me taking pictures of Angela taking pictures of Monica and Danni Lu taking pictures of Danni Ampi. Yes, that is all quite accurate.

Continuation of the "photographer to the photographers" series.

Continuation of "photographer to the photographers".
Location: San Pudenzia basilica. The colours of the exterior of this basilica were extraordinary. The whole time I was just dreaming of having a decent SLR camera. This point-and-shoot with its constant wide apeture is more than a little annoying.

Danni Ampi's accompanying shot to the previous shot.

2005-09-23T18:49:00.000+02:00

San Pudenzia. Alright, I know, it's another artistic shot. So sue me. My ever-faithful Dannilu, and an unwitting Claire make for a photo with decent compositional depth. I know, the foreground is washed out, but what do you expect with a $150 digital point and shoot?

2005-09-23T18:42:00.000+02:00

Part of a post brought from the Holy Land, to which it is believed our Lord was chained and scourged.

2005-09-23T18:34:00.000+02:00

Erin reading unwittingly. Perhaps you won't like this photos as much as myself, but the spot she chose to sit in was so very symmetric that I couldn't help it.

2005-09-23T18:28:00.000+02:00

From inside San Pudenzia basilica. Bottom: Anni Clark and Christina Matatics. Top: Angela Von Ehr, Dannilu, Danni Ampi.

2005-09-23T18:25:00.000+02:00

THIS is Italy. Tiny cars, and pizza. And yes, that is how we found this particular car on this particular avenue on this particular morning, pizza and all. Julian couldn't resist. After he finished the pizza he stole the car as well.

2005-09-22T17:13:00.000+02:00

Danni-Loo. St. Paul Outside the Wall basilica.

2005-09-22T17:09:00.000+02:00

Inside the Pantheon. It's very difficult to give any sense of the breadth of that dome. But at least we get a good sense of the unbelievable awesomeness of The Julian

2005-09-22T17:08:00.000+02:00

After assiduously avoiding the museum guards...

2005-09-22T16:59:00.000+02:00

Emma and St. Paul face off.

2005-09-22T14:54:00.000+02:00

Blurry picture of the prison where Peter and Paul were kept. There would have be none of the artificial lighting that we had, except maybe for the occasional candle. On the left is me, my head actually touching the ceiling of the dungeon, which gives you a sense of the dimensions.

2005-09-22T14:43:00.000+02:00

Umbrella fight outside the pantheon. Adam Wilson is actually the disembodied figure wielding the other umbrella.

2005-09-22T14:27:00.000+02:00

My personal favourite place to go. St. Andrea's basilica. The golden hues are something indescribable.

2005-09-22T14:25:00.001+02:00

Inside St. Peter's 7:00 AM Sunday morning. There was a Mass of all of the bishops installed into office in the last year, worldwide.

2005-09-22T14:25:00.000+02:00

St. Peter's at 6:30 Sunday morning. Gorgeous, rich blue hues in the sky that Julian's camera miraculously captured quite well.

Julianism of the Day

2005-09-21T20:50:00.000+02:00

In exercising his infinite wisdom Julian has discovered what he has chosen to label--in sequential order from highest to lowest importance--the three pillars of philosophy.

These are:
1) Wine
2) Sleep
... (elipse necessary according to paragraph 58 of the Julian catechism)
3) Rationality

As is to be expected, the consequences of this teaching are sometimes bizarre, since at the dinner table it has been known to occur that a neophyte in the study of Julianism will make the request: "Pass the philosophy please."

This however is heresy, since Julian has made clear the truth that although wine obviously forms the crux of the study of philosophy, and may be thought of as the most weight-bearing of the three columns, the other two are, in various measures, absolutely necessary for the pursuit of knowledge and the love of wisdom. Without one or the other for support, in the end, although it may take some time for the disaster to occur, and the student may for some time keep up the appearance of philosophizing with the support of the sole pillar of wine, the ivory tower will collapse.

Such heretical neophytes have been subject to punishment according to paragraph 2 of the Julian catechism: kaphoozling until hilarity sets in.

Contact Information

2005-09-21T20:45:00.000+02:00

Contact information for Julian (Remus) and John (Romulus):

Casa La Salle
Via Aurelia 472-476
00165 Roma
Italy

Telephone: 0039-06-66523301
Ask for room # 439

E-mail
John: jjalsevac@lifesite.net
Julian: julesarts@hotmail.com

In the distant off chance that any should you feel tempted to send any substantial packages in this direction, I would greatly disuade you from doing so, since, for reasons that nobody can discover, there is an absolutely enormous fee here at the Casa for receiving packages.

Etc.

2005-09-19T23:35:00.000+02:00

Today, horror of horrors, classes have begun. I'm quite sure that until now I didn't believe it possible that we were to waste hours in a classroom with this wealth of knowledge, of history and theology and everything else that man has set his mind to and God has given Man to plow with his intellect and imagination, within a few mere minutes of travel.

This morning’s class, however, in an appropriate fashion, rather than being held inside a classroom, was transported to the streets of Rome, to the Pantheon (which boasts the largest dome in the world, which, if you must know, is breathtaking), to some sort of collection of ruinous pagan temples named uncreatively after the first four letters of the alphabet, and to the prison where the apostles Peter and Paul were incarcerated and awaited their eventual executions.

The pagan ruins made little impression on me. Such things are scattered everywhere
around this city, and furthermore it is a good bet that we walk over a good dozen or so of them each day, buried far beneath the cobblestone of modern-day Rome, and likely destined never to be uncovered unless modern-day Rome itself should one day fall prey to the ravishing hands of time. Which, I suppose, it probably will, as all things do.

The prison where Peter and Paul were kept made an enormous impression on me, although I am sure, not enough of one. The appropriate reaction could only have been to fall to my knees and to have wept and kissed the ground and to have prayed with such tears streaming down my
face; to have wept for the suffering of Peter and Paul, and to have wept for my own paralyzing cowardice, and to have kissed the earth where once lay the broken bodies of these men with more of the courage of God and the love of Christ than I fear I will ever know or have.

It is told that Peter and Paul converted all forty-seven of their fellow prisoners, as well as their two jailers. It is also told, by all accounts accurately, that, being without the water with which to baptize those forty-seven and two, a miraculous spring burst up through the stone floor when the divine liquid was needed.

I could not say what the dimensions of that dreadful dungeon are; but in order to have converted their forty-seven fellow prisoners, there would have had to be just that many men crammed into that damp, unilluminated, demonic place. There would not have had even enough space to lie down; and they were there, if I recall correctly, for nine months. We cannot fathom; it is so infinitely beyond anything in our experience. And as I stood there I closed my eyes and I am sure that I tasted something of the fear and the horror that settled itself on the shivering souls of those forty-nine men in that cell; and even that vague taste was more than I could bear, and I shook it off before it completely overwhelmed me.

In the stone of the ceiling of the cell is cut a hole only a few feet in diameter, through which prisoners would have been lowered to serve their sentence, that, one way or another, resulted in death. And at the back of the dungeon was another sort of aperture through which the corpses of the dead would have been removed: dead by starvation; dead by pneumonia; dead
by God knows what else—-fear, most likely, and despair, which is likely so often the cause of death of such men, and which disease no doctor has yet been able to diagnose. Although Peter and Paul proved themselves doctors capable of curing it, with the grace of God.

The Pantheon also made a deep impression on me, but for very different reasons. Facing the front of the Pantheon, one sees only the expanse of the portico, which is bordered by a number—perhaps a dozen or so—very large, impressive columns of the Corinthian species. Then above these around the perimeter of the portico there is the architrave, which, as we travel vertically, gives way to a roof that comes to a peak. From this angle there is no sign at all of a dome, for it is cleverly hidden by this façade and the peaked roof; this was done quite purposely, and ingeniously, such that upon entering the Pantheon one is completely bowled over, thrown off one's feet, overcome in one's senses, by the sheer immensity of the dome that rises overhead. Walking through those doors feels how I imagine it would feel if you had had a twenty pound brick sitting on top of your head all your life, and of a sudden some blessed liberator came along and plucked the thing off; and certainly in that moment, with that accustomed weight suddenly gone, you would feel as if you might very well rise right off the ground. Such is the liberating effect of that impossible bit of architecture's breadth billowing above one's head.

Our guide had in fact explained that this was the intended effect even before we walked through the first century giant bronze doors, but even so my skepticism led me to be delightfully unprepared for it.

After that we came back to our hotel, which doubles as our school. After lunch was philosophy, the professor of which could not possibly have yet left his twenties, who does not have the piece of paper which so many value now as the only possible indication of learning, and who almost immediately proved himself immensely more knowledgeable than most who do have it. It is a two hour class in medieval philosophy, and I was enthralled from beginning to end. I’m sure I’ll have much more to say about that in the future. So I will leave it for now.

Pax.

Romulus

The Sequel

2005-09-19T00:46:00.000+02:00

The Confessions of Julian Ahlquist

(A continuation of the post by Romulus below. Read previous post first in order for this one to possibly make sense.)

By Remus

I contemplated abandoning the cursed suitcase at a different terminal and having that one shut-down and swarmed with bomb-squads and airplane delays rather than our terminal, so that we would be just fine. But then I was overcome by the small residue of conscience I had left, as most of it had been eroded away by violent thoughts against the French. My heart oscillated in painful gasps as I surveyed the Airport battleground. To me, this suitcase was worse than a bomb. I wished it was a bomb, so then it would blow up and disappear and leave me alone. But no, it was a normal suitcase. It wouldn’t go away.

As I headed toward an alternate terminal, I threw myself at the mercy of the airport ticket agents, saying, “Excuse me, I thought this was my friend’s bag, but it isn’t. What should I do? It’s not my bag. I don’t know whose it is.” And I didn’t mention that I had brought it through security illegally.

They asked me, “What’s your airliner?”

And I shot back in haste, “Air France.”

To my chronic depression, they explained that this terminal was, in fact, not Air France but Luftansteinawitz or something wretched like that. They commanded me to take the terrible luggage back to the Air France terminal. This, of course, was out of the question, as the legalistic French weasel from hell was standing guard at those very gates with the knowledge of our sin.

At this point, I executed a plan which I had kept in the back of my mind if all diplomacy should fail. I charged into the bathroom, opened wide the stall, and set the suitcase upon the toilet seat. Here, I rested, meditating in silence what evil consequence might come should I give this bag a final resting place in this lavatory jail. How long would this hermitage outlive the janitorial world before some unsuspecting Mexican would drop his mop in terror and run for help to the bomb squad? The police would investigate the bag, and perhaps employ hidden security cameras to discover the idiot behind the scare. Surely, either man or camera would behold my entrance to the latrine with the bag and my exiting without it, and they would have their revenge.

The toilet was not the destiny for this unholy grail, so I discerned it had a vocation elsewhere. I decided to stuff the entire suitcase into a trash can. What legal snare could grip me then? People throw a bunch of stuff in garbage bins at airports, but they aren’t crucified for it. Why then could I not throw an illegal suitcase in it as well? The answer was simple in my case: it was too big. I thought about ejecting the contents first, giving the bag greater flexibility to sail through the opening of the can, but, alas, the case was built too solid, and jettisoning the cargo would not ease its wasteful travel. So I disembarked from the bathroom on the edge of despair in the sea of chaos where time and French sought my destruction.

I found a security guard gliding innocently down an escalator. I sought to make his life miserable by heaving this burden onto him for my own salvation. Maybe, just maybe, he would be the Messiah.

I proclaimed to him, “Excuse me, sir.” After which flowed from my lips a golden-tongued stream of the most Ciceronian eloquence rivaling the rhetoric of John Crysostom himself that could persuade anyone to do anything. This man, however, was not convinced. Mental reservation had dammed the tides of incriminating information, yet still this individual, after he asked, “Did you bring this bag into the airport?” (To which I replied ‘yes’ with great vexation), told me that it was my responsibility and that I should take it to Air France. I lamented to him, “I don’t want this bag any more. Just take it and incinerate it.” But no. He did, however, suggest that I could take it to the luggage office to plead my case there. And as the luggage office was not French, I agreed to this alternative.

Unfortunately, this new destination seemed like it was in France ... allegorically. It was quite a hike, and more like a painful sprint, as I was bearing this bane of bureaucracy as well as my two legitimate carry-on’s. My tongue, once so Ciceronian, became parched like desert. An endless canal of moving sidewalks was before me, crowded with Japanese people, forcing me out onto the immobile floor, making me rely on my own locomotion for success. At this dark hour, I became convinced that I would miss my flight. I would not be going to Rome. I would not enter the Eternal City. I would be left behind.

Yet still I kept going, almost indifferent to the law now. They could harm my body but not my soul so I didn’t care. I marched up to the Baggage Office and rejoiced sarcastically to witness of very long line congesting this alleged Baggage Office. I didn’t have time to storm this Bastille so I went up to an American, a guy standing near the place with a walkie-talkie, one who understood oppression and was not shackled to the Satanism of Bureaucracy, and said, “Sir, I thought this bag was my friend’s, but it’s not. I don’t know whose it is. I need to catch a flight.” With humane undertones in his voice he told me to get in line. But in my dying breath, I called out again, “I’m probably going to miss my flight. I’m really late.” And behold! The camel was cleaved in two! He hesitated and said, “All right, go catch your flight. We’ll take it.” He popped open his walkie-talkie and reported, “We have an unclaimed baggage in sector –” as I bolted for freedom. I did not look back.

Perhaps the bag erupted in a terrorist explosion for all I know, as I ran with my back to it, for God did not find even ten righteous bureaucrats there. I did not dare look back at Sodom and Gomorrah for a water fountain, though my tongue had turned into a pillar of salt. I persevered to the distant terminal, hoping that it had not been overrun by the enemy. I passed through, the French did not decapitate me, and I came into the Promised Plane. My friends tried to interrogate me about what I had done, but I simply smiled nervously, wondering if they might still be watching me. I sat down and prayed and when the machine took flight, I knew I had won. The bag had been destroyed, and I had not.

Upon sitting peacefully in my 2^nd class seat, I remembered I had discreetly removed the name tag from the evil suitcase before we went through security. I reached in my pocket and found it. “Bryan Fox.” The airport had sent Greg Roth this suitcase claiming that it was his, even though the suitcase had “Bryan Fox” written on the tag. Why would they do that? Furthermore, why the heck didn’t we check the name tag before we tried to check it in!? We could have avoided everything! Idiot! Now poor old Bryan Fox will never see his suitcase again. It’s been incinerated. We have his phone number and e-mail address, though, and John and I thought about contacting him, but we wouldn’t know what to say.

But I’m glad it happened. I do fear my return to the United States, but I am confident that I can plead my case with legalistic subterfuge. Javert will be waiting. But I am Jean val Jean.

In The Beginning

2005-09-18T19:57:00.000+02:00

Julian Ahlquist And the Case of the Cursed Luggage

By Romulus

Nobody said traveling would be easy. And absolutely everybody said that traveling with Julian Ahlquist would be lunacy; and this most especially in my case. Not the least of those who portentously dissuaded me, warning of impending tragedies and devastating mental and physical traumas, is my former roommate Paul Provencher.

Paul, it should be noted, has proven himself singularly able to effortlessly keep track of my worldly possessions and in large part my whole physical person, which often wanders about getting into all sorts of trouble without my consciously being aware that that is what it is doing; being aware of just how much I depend on this sort of thing, and well aware that Julian would be more likely to absent-mindedly lead me off a cliff in the Alps onto my final resting place of jagged rocks than to be able to perpetually pinpoint the precise position of my pipe (alliteration strangely unintended), he fretted for at least thirty seconds about whether I would survive without him.

Not surprisingly, both what had not been said, and what had been said, are proven correct. I may very well not survive this trip. And yet, four days into this pilgrimage, or whatever name you care to give it, I still firmly ascribe to the belief that sometimes living on the edge, and even a little over the edge, maybe even contorted and bleeding and dying on a bed of jagged rocks in the Alps, is worth its weight in gold.

For instance, the very first act of mine and Julian’s on this trip, even before leaving American soil, was one that was dreadfully and shamelessly illegal, as certain uniformed people-who-would-know repeatedly told us in angry voices while threatening to call the sort of uniformed people-who-know who specialize in the use of firearms. Jolly good fun.

The following not-so-tall tale is one that Julian and I have told a good two dozen times in the last few days, and is likely more amusing in person, since we have developed a nuanced accompaniment of bizarre and grandiose hand gestures and impassioned anti-French invective; but this article will simply have to do.

The curtains rise on the campus of Christendom College on the day of our departure. At first it had been our intention to ride to Dulles airport in a Christendom van some time in the early afternoon. Sam Philips, however, graciously offered to drive Julian and myself a little later which presented the blessed opportunity for me to finish packing and to enjoy a little more time with a particularly lovely native of Oklahoma. At some point while doing exactly that I received a frantic message that our beloved registrar, Walter Janaro, was in Regina Coeli on the verge of having an aneurysm. The reason was a piece of baggage that had mysteriously surfaced and that belonged to a student who had already left in the Christendom van.

The bag belonged to Greg Roth. It had, directly contrary to Greg’s specific request to the contrary, just been sent to the College by the airport which had misappropriated it the day before when Greg had flown in from Saskatchewan. The solution seeming clear. I took the bag, saved Walter’s life, or at least his sanity, and the matter seemed closed. It wasn’t. Goodness no.

A few tearful farewells later and we arrived at Dulles. Seeing as both Julian and I each already had the maximum of two bags to check in, and Greg’s bag appearing too large to take as a carry-on, I bucked up for a fight and asked if I could check in the bit of luggage on Greg’s behalf. The expected negative was delivered by the expected airport peon, a pasty young fellow with spiky black hair and a lethargic attitude. I asked if I could speak to someone in authority. Certainly. Spiky-haired youth disappears and pops back with rodent-like Frenchman in tow.

I explain the dilemma. “It is illegal” I am informed in a thick French accent. Because of security reasons, I am told. The weasely Frenchman proves himself unable to explain why they can’t just search the bag and thereby alleviate all security concerns so that we can all go on our merry ways and be friends. But, I quickly remind myself with a curious bent for optimism, this is a bureaucrat, a weasely, bald French bureaucrat nonetheless, and I shouldn’t expect too much, and certainly, God forbid, not logic. “Well then, what if the 50% bagless Roth, who had already checked into the airport, comes out here and claims the bag.” Certainly. If you can get him to do it within fifteen minutes, at which point check-in for the flight ends, which is unlikely.

“Well, could you please page him for us then?” No. It’s against the rules. “Can we use your telephone?” No. “Julian, do you by chance have ESP? Can you channel spirits? Do you have mystical powers of bilocation? Can you walk through walls? As prime-minister of the kaphoozle ministry can you order this French bureaucrat to shut his trap and allow us to do as we please?” No. “What use are you then?” None. “I see. I’ll remember that.”

Turning back to the bureaucrat who has enclosed himself in his comfortable and impermeable fortress of red-tape: “Well, what are our options here, then, if you don’t mind our asking?” You can leave the bag somewhere in the airport, the bomb squad will be called, and the bag will be sniffed, searched, and incinerated. “Ah. Not much of an option is it, really?”

Dark feelings of hopelessness set in.

The time has come for drastic measures. Julian becomes bad cop, furrowing his eyebrows together and raising his voice, while I becoming good cop, maintaining a cool, collected, reasonable demeanour. Julian begins to yell at theweasely French fellow, while I pretend to try to calm him down and ask cool, reasonable questions of the bureaucrat. Contrary to the plan this bald, weasely Frenchman does not raise his hands in surrender, nor does he announce his intention to drop everything and have an immediate revolution. “What,” I ask in what strikes me as a particularly ingenious maneuver, “if we actually lied before, and this is our bag after all? What’s to stop us from claiming it as our own?” The fact that you told me that it wasn’t. “Ah. Yes. There is that isn’t it? Quid est veritas?” He’s not taking the existentialist bait.

I am feeling glum. The distinction between the good cop and the bad cop becomes increasingly glossed over; and a spark of fear ignites the eyes of the weasely Frenchman when he realizes that he has two large, furrow-browed, stage-voiced, indistinguishable, angry, curly-haired men who are seriously questioning the merit of his continued existence.

He threatens to call the police. This strikes myself and Julian as a good point to ease off a little. We do. Actually, we turn around and leave; steam is billowing from Julian’s ears.

After exploring our options in depth, and concluding that we don’t have any, we decide that rather than leaving our friend’s bag to be sniffed, searched, and incinerated we will bank upon the inability of bureaucrats to communicate with one another and bring the offending bag through security as a piece of carry-on luggage. Brilliant. This we do, with not the least amount of trouble. And as we stride away from the X-ray machines, on the right side of the airport, we are both filled with feelings of elation. Now all we need to do is take the bag on the plane, hope that Greg doesn’t say anything about it, and upon arrival in Rome transfer it to his possession. Foolproof.

Foolproof, of course, if it were not that the weasely Frenchman happens to lead a double-life as a ticket collector inside the terminal. The sight of him, there should be no need to say, causes great consternation. We curse in fashions that are not entirely Christian. But he has not yet seen us and we make full use of his ignorance. As a last ditch maneuver we engage the services of one of the girls to go up to the front of the line, to grab Greg who is waiting in queue, and to bring him back to where we are standing.

“Greg,” we say in nervous stage-whispers that can probably be heard in Timbuktu, “we have just brought your bag in through security illegally. That weasel-like Frenchman up there is out for our blood. Take the bag, and cross your fingers, and pray like a maniac, and maybe with the Grace of God you can get it by him. Just take the damn thing off our hands! We don’t want it any more. It is cursed.”

However, Greg is looking at us in what strikes me as a situationally inappropriate fashion. We wait his answer.

He looks down. And then he looks up. “That’s not my bag.” He giggles nervously. We both think about socking him one, but fortunately for him we have bigger problems now.

We discuss leaving the bag here in the terminal. But a man in the line behind us says that we can’t do that because they’ll shut down the whole terminal and our flight won’t leave. As a bunch of us throw ideas back and forth I notice that Julian’s face has donned a frightening look of determination, and there is a red gleam in his eyes. Of a sudden he grabs the offending bag with a visceral grunt of frustration and anger, turns around and before I can get out a word, disappears through the crowd. It is an image that I will not soon forget.

Ten minutes later I am on the airplane, and Julian is not. Seven minutes before the flight is scheduled to leave I have said fifty-eight full rosaries, and have experimented in the use of the force and voodoo to will Julian onto the airplane. Five minutes before the flight is scheduled to leave, to my immense relief, he appears; a goofy grin is splashed across his face.

“Thank God!” I say as he takes his seat. “But what on earth did you do with that accursed bit of baggage?”

Julian, however, only smiles mysteriously, unwilling to say. I explore different scenarios and continue to pepper him with questions. But he will not reveal his secret, and all the way to Rome that mysterious, inscrutable smile is the only answer I receive to my inquiries.