Feast Day: November 24th | Patronage: City of Zadar, Croatia| Iconography: Bearded, Arrayed as Roman Military Officer, Carrying emblems of Martyrdom
I want to take you on a tour today. If you walked up to the church of St. Chrysogonus in Rome, you’d see the stout, noble, façade jutting up behind the older 12th century belltower. Stepping through the vestibule and atrium, you’ll see a classic example of a Baroque (16th century) Roman Basilica. Ancient columns sedately separate the long nave from narrower aisles down each side of the Church and a coffered ceiling draws the eye upward while your feet are firmly planted on the exquisite comatose floor. Bl. Anna Maria Taigi’s tomb (and incorrupt body) is off to your left along with other monuments, and to the right are frescoes depicting saints and angels. If you walked forward, the ambo is perched on one of the ancient columns above a smattering of pews while the 900 year old altar is canopied by a 500 year old baldachino.
But, if you stepped into the sacristy, you’d find a staircase going down, and if you really want to see Rome, and really see this Church, you should continue down the dim and musty stairwell. As your eyes adjust, you find that you have taken several steps back in time. The City has somehow been built on top of itself over the centuries, so if you go 20 feet down, you also go 20 centuries back in time. You immediately see remnants of an earlier church which sits not quite directly under the current one. Built during the reign of Constantine, you are now standing in the first Christian Church in Rome! Before that Emperor constructed the first Cathedral on the Lateran hill, or the first Basilica over St. Peter’s bones, Christians had already built one here in this bustling section of Trestevere near to the Tiber River. It only had one big nave – no side aisles – but they did build a beautiful apse to arch over the sanctuary and decorated the walls with vivid frescoes (some still visible) over the five centuries they came to this Church. Off to the right side of this church were rooms where the priests would have vested and other things readied for the Sacred Liturgy, a sacristy in our terminology (they would have called it a “secretarium” in Latin or “pastophoria” in Greek). On the other side of the Church, we find a number of basins or pools that would have been adjacent to the body of the church. There, as the Church exploded in numbers during those first centuries, countless people would have received baptism and began to join the Christians in worship.
Two of the basins are, however, are older, even than this 3rd century Church. They, along with two ancient sarcophagi and some of the crumbled walls, date to before Constantine, perhaps to the days when Rome was a Republic and certainly these were here when persecution raged outside. The extra basins were probably part of a fullonica, where cloth was dyed and cleaned, and the walls are those of a home standing here before the Church was built. Inside that home, Christians would have come to spend the Lord’s day together, celebrating the liturgy, eating and praying and reverencing those martyred. Probably someone would have shared the story of St. Chrysogonus, the Roman military officer who prized his service to Christ over his service to Diocletian, and was killed for it. Most of our stories about him indicate he lived up in northern Italy, though his being so celebrated here in Rome may indicate that he, or a similar martyr, actually lived nearby. Certainly, his story inspired many, because when this group decided to risk building the first Christian Church in a city where Christianity wasn’t yet legal, they entrusted it, and themselves, to his patronage.
He’s also a perfect patron for the Trinitarians who care for the Church today, a religious order that offered themselves in ransom for Christians captured by the Moors.
– Fr. Dominic went to visit this Church every year while he studied in Rome on Monday of the 5th Week of Lent. Each day of Lent is dedicated to a different ancient Roman Church and people will go there for Mass on that day, so the Basilica of St. Chrysogonus was always our destination this last week before Holy Week. Though we don’t have 40 such Churches to do the same all throughout Lent, our practice of traveling to 7 different churches here in Springfield on the Evening of Holy Thursday to visit the altars of repose is a miniature version of this idea of practicing pilgrimage during the season of Lent (this “7 Church Walk” was an idea revived and made popular by St. Philip Neri.)