My parish church in Rome

One of the great joys of my life has been to spend nearly 14 years living in Rome, first as a student and then as Rector of the Venerable English College. I suppose the best way to know a strange city is to walk everywhere. As a student, I rarely took public transport and would remember at night my day’s walk, piazza by piazza, church by church, from Pantheon to Forum to Colosseum. Those years were in many ways a delight and I can honestly say, only slightly tongue-in-cheek, that I learnt nearly as much from viewing the city of Rome as from my studies in the Gregorian University.

Nowadays the responsibilities of being a cardinal may seem to outweigh its pleasures, and visits to Rome are usually on administrative matters; but there is one particular source of delight which never fails: the visits I make to what is technically my ‘parish church’ in Rome.

Cardinal priests have nominal title to a church in Rome and through pure chance — is there any such thing if one believes in the operation of divine providence? — I have been given charge of one of the finest churches in the city, the basilica of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Its name signals that it is the church of the Blessed Virgin Mary built on the site of a temple dedicated to Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom.

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I never hear the name of the church without smiling at the mischievous remark of Karl Barth, the great 20th-century Swiss Calvinist theologian. For him, ‘Santa Maria sopra Minerva’ was a perfect description of what is wrong with Catholicism: it is founded, said Barth, upon ancient pagan wisdom (and not on the Gospel), is too accepting of insights which originate outside the confines of Christianity (because it is too positive about the presence of grace everywhere) and it makes too much of Mary (because it dares to think that human beings have the dignity to ‘co-operate’ with God through the exercise of their freedom).