Feast Day: December 31st
How would you go about building the Kingdom of God in the heart of ancient Rome? As in, if Jesus entrusted to you the task of bringing the Gospel to a place where most still rejected it, what would be your strategy? Would you start by preaching in the synagogue, as did St. Paul? Would you concentrate on works of charity, protecting those who were vulnerable, unwanted, and discarded by that society, with St. Lawrence as your exemplar? Would you seek to convert the Emperor and work from the top down, as did Constantine’s mother St. Helena? How about engaging in apologetic debates with the leaders and philosophers of the day, as did St. Justin Martyr? Obviously, the evangelists of the early church did all of these things (and more!) to proclaim a different “Son of God” and different “Good News” to the Eternal City which had plenty of emperors already claiming that title, and the definitive accomplishment of world peace.
One saintly woman took a different tack. The Caelian Hill, though the smallest of Rome’s 7 Hills, and not the center of government or commerce or empire (much of that took place on and between the Palatine and Capitoline Hills), for many centuries was the coveted place for people of power and wealth to build ever more opulent villas. One of the richest of these families, the Valerii Publicolae, traced their ancestry back to Publius Valerius Poplicola, the legendary character who helped overturn the Etruscan kings and turn Rome into a Republic. Consuls, generals, orators, and wealthy patrons continue down the line from 500 BC to 500 AD … oh, and their house took up most of the Eastern slope of the “Caelius Mons”!
As this family was at the zenith of their wealth, popularity, and power, around 100 BC, at the bottom of ‘their hill’, between the Caelian and Palatine Hills, connecting the Capitoline Temple of Jupiter to the densely populated Subura district, and intersecting the main thoroughfare stretching between the Forum and the Colosseum, was built the famous “Clivus Scauri” road. Painstakingly, impossibly, unnecessarily, paved with perfectly fitted blocks of tufa stone – “opus quadratum” as the architects called it – it gently curved up their hill with drainage and decoration and beautiful arches all along the way. On this road Julius Caesar triumphantly returned after defeating Pompey. Along it the vestral virgins would have processed. Beside it, countless throngs would have watched as the ashes of the newly deified Augustus were carried to his immense mausoleum. From it, throngs could see the gladiatorial games in the Colosseum. Upon it, thousands would have tried to flee the Great Fire. This was Abbey Road, Broadway, Wall Street, the Champs-Elysees, and the Las Vegas Strip all in one, and Meliana grew up on it, actually, basically, she would inherit it.
How would you bring the Gospel there, onto that hill, along that road? A hundred years before St. Felix would build a church on top of it, and two hundred years before Trasilla and Emiliana grew up along it, this was the task given to St. Melania (called “the Younger” because her grandmother, also Melania, is also a saint!) Newly married to Valerius Pinianus (just as important as his name sounds, one of the richest men in Rome), Melania was more and more distraught at the opulence and luxury of her life in her family’s palace on the Caelian Hill. Their two children died young, strengthening Melania’s argument that they needed to leave behind the worldly expectations their honorable name entitled (and enslaved) them to, and instead embrace Christian asceticism. I can only imagine how difficult it must have been for this couple to discern what the Lord was calling them to! But eventually they agreed, choosing charity and poverty over than comfort and fame. Melania gave away her splendid garments to decorate churches, her country estates to house poor families, slaves, and pilgrims, and they began to travel the Christian world lavishly giving away their wealth, building Churches and monasteries around Africa including for St. Augustine, ransoming the inhabitants of Lipari from pirates, and establishing a convent near the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.
But this was only a fraction of their wealth. At Melania’s insistence, the Emperor Honorius enlisted the Provincial Governors across the empire to be responsible for the sale of the couple’s vast properties because their enormous value meant the possibility of catastrophic fraud, embezzlement, and intrigue. And that palace on the Caelian? Some, thinking the couple insane, tried to confiscate it through nefarious means (though revolts in the city stymied those conspiracies). But Melania and Pinianus couldn’t even find someone with the financial means to purchase it, and after the Goth invasion of 408 AD, they simply gave it away. And, on it, like on so many other parcels of land throughout the empire, they funded a monastery. Thus, in place of the elegance and opulence of the residences on the Caelian Hill, monks lived lives of fasting and prayer. And, instead of the barbarity of a vivarium holding wild animals before their release into the colosseum, now pilgrims made their way up the Clivus Scauri to pagan shrines turned into Christian churches.
– Fr. Dominic spent five years climbing the Caelian Hill to the Basilica of Ss. John and Paul, and never knew how this was one epicenter of the Christian transformation of that ancient city. All made possible by a lot of earthly riches entrusted to the purposes of God.