Rome is a city of nostalgia. It’s a place you seem to have visited even if it’s your first time. The initial sights, sounds, and smells deeply penetrate your psyche, especially if you’re Christian. That’s because, if you’re Christian, Rome is your home.
A self-confessed homebody, Pope Francis didn’t “return” to Rome until 2001 when he visited the Eternal City for the first time to receive a red hat from the hands of Saint John Paul II. But the Archbishop of Buenos Aires didn’t feel at home amidst the stark, imposing columns erected by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) in the Square of Saint Peter. He felt much more at home kneeling in front of an icon known as the Salus Populi Romani (“Health of the Roman People”), housed in the Borghese Chapel of the Basilica of Saint Mary Major.
Archbishop Bergoglio was immediately attracted to this magnificent image of Our Lady that has long been an important symbol of the Virgin’s protection over Rome. Attributed to the hand of Saint Luke, the icon is particularly revered by Romans whenever sickness sacks the city. Who could have foreseen how significant Francis’s devotion to it would be before COVID brought the Roman people to its knees once more, praying another plague be lifted? Bergoglio’s dedication to the Salus was also due to the Jesuits’ constant use of it from the sixteenth century onwards to promote Marian devotion through the “Sodality of Our Lady.”
As Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Bergoglio, like many first-time pilgrims, dropped into Saint Mary Major when he arrived in 2001, since it’s the closest of the four major Basilicas to the main train station of Rome, Stazione Termini. Thus, it’s a natural place to begin one’s spiritual experience of the city of martyrs.
Legend has it that Pope Liberius (reigned 352-366) built the church at the bidding of a Roman patrician named John who, together with his childless wife, vowed all their possessions to the Virgin. The couple approached Liberius after having witnessed a snowfall on the summit of the Esquiline Hill in the middle of summer, an event we commemorate each year on August 5th as the feast of “Our Lady of the Snows” (i.e., the Dedication of the Basilica of Saint Mary Major). The pope decreed that the shrine be erected on that very spot.
Its doors were solemnly opened this past January 1st to usher in the “Jubilee of Hope,” a privileged time for “an intense experience of the love of God that awakens in hearts the sure hope of salvation in Christ” (Spes non confundit, 6). When he decreed the opening of the Jubilee, Francis encouraged pilgrims to spend time at Saint Mary Major and other shrines to Our Lady throughout the city, “confident that everyone, especially the suffering and those most in need, will come to know the closeness of Mary, the most affectionate of mothers, who never abandons her children and who, for the holy people of God, is ‘a sign of certain hope and comfort’” (ibid., 24). The doors will remain open until 28 December 2025, regardless of who succeeds the late Pontiff.
When you enter this gorgeous temple, your eyes are immediately drawn to the splendid gold mosaics adorning the nave and triumphal arch with scenes from the life of Mary and her Divine Son. You are overwhelmed by a space that commemorates the Church’s teaching that Mary is Theotokos or “God-bearer” as declared by the Council of Ephesus in 431 A.D. Francis cultivated a deep devotion to Our Lady throughout his life, describing her motherhood not only as a “fundamental datum of faith” but as a reminder that “God has a Mother” and is thus “bound forever to our humanity, to the point that our humanity is His humanity.”
Having celebrated Mass in front of the Salus Populi Romani at the outset of his pontificate, and having visited each time he departed for and returned from a papal journey abroad, it is only fitting that Francis be laid to rest there. He will join six other pontiffs, all of whom were called to lead the Church through tumultuous times. A relic of the Holy Crib is preserved there to remind him of how the story of salvation began. The sacred remains of Saint Jerome are there to remind him of how we have come to know the story of salvation through the Holy Scriptures. And the brilliant architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who transformed a decrepit Rome into a wonder of marble and whose work Francis understandably found stark and imposing in Saint Peter’s Square, will be there to remind him and us that sic transit gloria mundi.
Photo by Nick Castelli on Unsplash