When in Rome: A Journal of Life in Vatican City - Softcover

Hutchinson, Robert J. J.

 
9780385486477: When in Rome: A Journal of Life in Vatican City
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0385486472 ISBN 13: 9780385486477
Verlag: Crown, 1998

Inhaltsangabe

Lighthearted and altogether fascinating, When in Rome is a delightful backstairs tour of one of the world's most mysterious and eccentric cities. With his wife and three young sons, Robert Hutchinson moved to Rome shortly before his thirty-ninth birthday, intending to explore the Vatican in depth. He sought to capture "the personality of the place: the smells and the traffic, the rich delicacies of Roman food, the perils of the Italian language, the way Italian monsignori push their way to the front of the line, just like their lay countrymen." When in Rome is the extraordinary journal of his Roman sojourn.

With playful good humor, Hutchinson introduces the varied and colorful individuals who live and work in the Vatican. In the process, he explores the mysterious orders of medieval knights, some dating back to the First Crusade, which still play a vital role in the Vatican; explains how bumbling Vatican archaeologists found, and then lost, the bones of St. Peter; probes the sex lives of the popes, from the "pornocracy" of Sergius III to the incestuous orgies of Rodrigo Borgia; experiences high fashion in the Holy See, including a visit to the pope's personal tailor; encounters the weird relics of Catholicism, such as the mummified body of St. Pius X and a museum made entirely out of human bones; recounts the true story behind the True Cross, now kept in a run-down church near the Colosseum; and much, much more.

Humorous, irreverent, but ultimately respectful, When in Rome does for the Vatican what A Year in Provence did for the French countryside, in an unforgettable and unprecedented eyewitness account of one of the most fascinating places on Earth.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert J. Hutchinson studied philosophy as an undergraduate, moved to Israel to learn Hebrew, and earned a graduate degree in theology and New Testament studies.  He has written six books of popular history and travel.  He lives with his wife and children in a small seaside town on the west coast.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

When in Rome is a backstairs tour of one of the world's most mysterious and eccentric cities. Hutchinson introduces the varied and colorful individuals who live and work in the Vatican. In the process, he explores the mysterious orders of medieval knights, some dating back to the First Crusade, which still play a vital role in the Vatican; explains how bumbling Vatican archaeologists found, and then lost, the bones of St. Peter; probes the sex lives of the popes, from the "pornocracy" of Sergius III to the incestuous orgies of Rodrigo Borgia; experiences high fashion in the Holy See, including a visit to the pope's personal tailor; encounters the weird relics of Catholicism, such as the mummified body of St. Pius X and a museum made entirely out of human bones; recounts the true story behind the True Cross, now kept in a run-down church near the Colosseum; and much, much more.

Aus dem Klappentext

Lighthearted and altogether fascinating, "When in Rome is a delightful backstairs tour of one of the world's most mysterious and eccentric cities. With his wife and three young sons, Robert Hutchinson moved to Rome shortly before his thirty-ninth birthday, intending to explore the Vatican in depth. He sought to capture "the personality of the place: the smells and the traffic, the rich delicacies of Roman food, the perils of the Italian language, the way Italian monsignori push their way to the front of the line, just like their lay countrymen." "When in Rome is the extraordinary journal of his Roman sojourn.
With playful good humor, Hutchinson introduces the varied and colorful individuals who live and work in the Vatican. In the process, he explores the mysterious orders of medieval knights, some dating back to the First Crusade, which still play a vital role in the Vatican; explains how bumbling Vatican archaeologists found, and then lost, the bones of St. Peter; probes the sex lives of the popes, from the "pornocracy" of Sergius III to the incestuous orgies of Rodrigo Borgia; experiences high fashion in the Holy See, including a visit to the pope's personal tailor; encounters the weird relics of Catholicism, such as the mummified body of St. Pius X and a museum made entirely out of human bones; recounts the true story behind the True Cross, now kept in a run-down church near the Colosseum; and much, much more.
Humorous, irreverent, but ultimately respectful, "When in Rome does for the Vatican what "A Year in Provence did for the French countryside, in an unforgettable and unprecedented eyewitness account of one of the most fascinating places on Earth.

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A Legion of Decency Guide to the Vatican

Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine
There's always laughter and good red wine;
At least I've always found it so
Benedicamus Domino.
--Hilaire Belloc

One of the advantages of being a Catholic is that you get to see a lot of beautiful naked women.

You may never have realized that before, but it's true.  I never could understand why thick-headed, drooling Protestants would accuse us of being prudes when they gave the world the Puritans and the Moral Majority and we gave the world Rodin's The Kiss.

From Michelangelo to Madonna, Donatello to Salvador Dali, Catholic artists have felt little compunction about letting it all hang out ad majorem Dei gloriam.  The billboards outside our apartment in Rome, which each week featured a new topless model advertising perfume or a new brand of blue jeans, are merely carrying on an artistic tradition that goes back to Botticelli and Caravaggio, Titian and Bellini.

Everywhere you go in the Vatican, you see nudity.

The Sistine Chapel, of course--inside of whose echoing walls the cardinals elect the pope--is covered with naked men and women, all piled on top of one another in what looks for all the world like some sort of biblical orgy.  In the Vatican Treasury there is a magnificent bronze tomb of Sixtus IV, the patron of the arts and founder of the Vatican Library, completely covered by a series of topless, buxom nymphs each representing one of the liberal arts (Arithmetic, Astrology, Music, Grammar, and so on).  It's a testimony to the Catholic erotic sensibility, I think, that a pope's tomb is covered by a dozen bronze nudes.

The papal apartments in Castel Sant'Angelo are likewise decorated in frescoes that would have made Hugh Hefner proud: tall, lithe young women all raising their pendulous breasts with cupped hands to what one can only imagine were admiring papal eyes.  The Stufetta of Cardinal Bibbiena, today the seat of the Vatican Secretary of State in the Apostolic Palace, features a colorful painting of a tumescent Pan about to pounce upon a naked blond nymph combing her hair.  And in the oldest part of the Secret Archives, above the wooden cabinets filled with all those red-sealed papal bulls, are brightly painted seventeenth-century murals depicting scenes with bishops and popes--but interspersed throughout are full-sized decorative paintings of beautiful young women dressed in loose tunics that invariably fall off a shoulder to expose at least one jutting nipple.

Imagine the ruckus that would arise if a university or public library today decorated its walls with murals of topless teenage girls.


I bring all this up to explain why I found myself, at age thirty-nine--an aspiring if not very successful sinner better known for learned tomes on baccarat and seven card stud--living in Rome with my wife and three kids and poking around the sacred highways and byways of Vatican City.  It is a long, somewhat bizarre story that is weirdly bound up with travel and religion and my own strange inability to stay put very long.

I first came to Rome when I was nineteen years old, my imagination overheated with the wonders of Renaissance architecture and the braless halter top.  I was a tourist, of course, but also a pilgrim.  I was then and remain now a practicing Roman Catholic--meaning I rarely miss Sunday Mass, becoming irritable and anxious if I do (a condition that my non-Catholic friends think should be treated immediately with good drugs) and take the trouble to read papal encyclicals before ignoring them.  I ignore them not because I find any fault with their premises or logic--indeed, I'm always astonished by the lucidity and sane humanism of papal teaching--but just because I don't feel like living that virtuous a life.

The popes have written eloquently against social injustice, and, truth be told, I would do the world a whole lot more good ladling soup at a Catholic Worker kitchen than I ever would as a writer.  But I like being a writer; it's a lot easier and more interesting than working for a living.  Similarly, the popes have condemned as sinful some of my favorite activities in the world, from ogling nearly naked girls on California beaches to gambling.  I was sitting in the Vatican Press Office one day when John Thavis, the bureau chief of the Catholic News Service in Rome, gave me a splendid summary of why the Vatican has publicly condemned state lotteries.  Having written a bit about the subject, I was naturally very interested.  I couldn't find fault with a single one of the arguments John adduced--at approximately fourteen million to one, state lotteries are not exactly a smart bet--but I also knew, as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow, that I wasn't about to quit gambling.

For most of my friends, though, that in itself is an irrefutable argument against Catholicism, with a logic as tight as an Aristotelian syllogism:

A.  The pope says it's immoral to drink to excess, indulge in wild promiscuity, and tell outrageous lies.

B.  But I like drinking to excess, indulging in wild promiscuity, and telling outrageous lies.

C.  Therefore, the pope is full of hooey.

A pretty airtight argument, I have to admit.  But not being trained as a theologian, I've never felt the need to come up with elaborate excuses to justify my vices, preferring, instead, to simply enjoy them.

However, I've never been quite able to shake myself free of my religion either.  Like a moth hovering around the flame, simultaneously attracted to and repelled by the bright light, I've always lived my life within the spiritual orbit of Rome and the Vatican.

I quite literally grew up with the events of the Second Vatican Council--beginning Catholic elementary school praying in Latin and ending it singing bad folk tunes in Swahili.  And during my high school and college years with the Jesuits, I was force-fed a steady diet of Karl Rahner and Gabriel Marcel, charismatic renewal and liberation theology, the St. Louis Jesuits and the United Farm Workers.

Even after college, I struggled to make sense out of the kaleidoscopic acid trip that is Catholicism, wrestling with the contradictory impulses that flowed out of Vatican II, dutifully reading liberal (Hans Küng) and conservative (Avery Dulles) theologians, trying to understand what Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular are all about.

Non-Catholics, with their traditional disdain for the alleged superstitions of Rome, aren't aware of just how ridiculously hyper-intellectualized Catholicism actually is, how the entire history of Western civilization is filtered, magnified, and reflected in its arcane symbolism and interminable philosophical disputes.  When you combine the relentless philosophizing with the mind-blowing imagery of the Church's liturgy and iconography, even in their vastly simplified contemporary forms--each Sunday being offered a cup of the savior's precious blood to drink, staring up at a vivid image of his dying body on a cross--you end up, quite frankly, with very confused individuals, but also with people driven by a lifelong desire to sort it all out.

And the center of it all, no matter what the Jesuits tell you--for good or for ill--is Rome, the Holy See, the Servant of the Servants of God.  Just as Jerusalem is the heart and soul of the Jewish people--"If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither!"--Rome is the heart and soul of the Catholic Faith.

It was here that a cranky fisherman from Galilee carried a tiny, flickering flame of a new religious...

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Verlag
Crown
Erscheinungsdatum
1998
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385486472
ISBN 13 
9780385486477
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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Verantwortliche Person
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