The Catacombs of Priscilla in Rome

Rome is often called the Eternal City, but we may also call it the city of eternal rest. Its marble façades and jagged ruins are so many mausoleums for miles of entangled passageways where the dead have been laid down. The seven hills and the glowing marble of Bernini and Baroque decadence of the capital and the pillars, thick and solid, evoke a martial dream of grandeur and order. Beneath the city, another architecture binds the city: wending damp passages lined with the bodies of the dead, ancient and fresh. These are the bodies of a beloved sister, brother, father, mother, daughter, or son. Sometimes in discrete coffins, or in rectangles carved into the walls, neat as a sailor’s bunk. 

There are many places to enter the underground Roman city. One entrance is in a small nunnery on the Via Salaria. To get there, you can take the metro or go on foot from the Palace of St. Peter, where cardinals gather and choose among their number the man to lead the Catholic World. 

Off the Villa Ada Park, you can visit the sisters of Benedictine Order. Like many orders of monks and nuns, they participate in the current global market through the making and selling of traditional crafts. Their handwoven woolen table runners are a bargain made possible by the working sisters who expect no surplus income for their own personal use. The sales price barely covers the costs of the wool. Whatever small profit they do generate goes towards communal living expenses and basic repairs. The plumbing in particular urgently needs attention. The eighteen hours of careful work that go into weaving these table-top masterpieces go unrecorded in the ledgers the same way their rosaries and prayers dissolve into the air. God alone accounts for the sisters’ work. 

The current members of the order are mostly an older bunch. Even if they were younger, it would be difficult to tell. White collars wrap the women’s faces rightly from their chins to their hairlines giving each of them a pleasing, anonymously oval face. No sister lives now that  served the convent during the Second World War. Their bodies lie interred and, for the moment, completely intact in the graveyard next to the convent’s chapel. It is unclear if the tradition of digging up the bodies once the flesh has decomposed and reburying the bones in the catacombs will continue in light of recent health codes. But the sisters seem unconcerned. Death and storage have always been matters of practical discipline. They have complete faith in the Almighty’s ability, come Judgment day, to find and reassemble their bodies. In the meantime, they make do. 

World War II is a proud moment in the order’s history. The Catholic Church did not formally condemn the Nazi regime, but many Roman Catholics, including Pope Pius XII himself, sheltered Jewish families. Likewise, the sisters objected to the NAZI policy on Jews and sheltered their fellow Romans. The nine-month Nazi occupation of Rome reached its pinnacle in October, 1943 when the Gestapo raided the city’s Jewish neighborhood and arrested more than 1200 people. In the subsequent months, another 600 Jewish individuals were arrested and deported. All 1800 were sent to Auschwitz. 16 survived. The Jewish population of Rome only persisted by going into hiding– and an estimated 11,000 did so.

One family of survivors were hidden and protected by the sisters of Villa Ada. After enduring cold, damp, terrifying and dull months underground, they lived to see the liberation of the city on June 4, 1944. Ten years later, to thank the sisters for their service, they commissioned a mosaic for the chapel above the entrance to the catacombs. The mosaic mimics of one of the most precious scenes from the catacombs below: A very, very early, probably second century, image of the Christian ritual of the Eucharist, wherein the priest, in imitation of Jesus at his final meal, or last supper, with his followers, breaks bread for the congregation to share in the ritual of Holy Communion.

The sisters gather daily to celebrate mass under the mosaic. Done in the style of the mosaics at Ravenna, this 1954 recreation evokes the ancient mediterranean eyes and flat style typical of catacomb art. The light catches the edges of glass to make the figures shine. At the far left, a bearded figure offers the bread of Christ to his brethren. Close your eyes and the outlines linger behind your eyelids: the image of these earliest brothers breaking bread in peace. After taking it in, you can go downstairs and see the original.

The catacombs smell cold: mildew, wet stone and the rot of clay earth and centuries of bones. In the dim light, you can see the original “Fractio Panis” faded after 1800 years to bare shapes and forms. It’s much smaller than the reproduction. It’s only ten inches tall. Look carefully, and you see the hair is different. Are those braids? Where are the folds of the toga? Each figure swells at the breast. Are these women? If they are, could they be celebrating the Eucharist without a male priest? Scholars have long been arguing about this fresco since it was rediscovered in 1894.

The images are faded enough that any suggestion has the power to shift your eye’s observation. Are your eyes playing tricks on you and making you see only men where there were women? Or do your eyes deceive you now that someone told you there are women there? In any case, what is unsure and impossible to verify, was made fixed and permanent by the artist of the 20th-century mosaic: The artists added a beard to the man breaking the bread and officiating the ceremony– which clears up any gender confusion immediately. 

But take the time to visit the catacombs below and you will see a woman breaking the bread of the Catholic Eucharist. Is this evidence of women as church leaders in the early Christian Church?