Brian H. Appleton
03-10-2008, 09:01 AM
My friend Father Flavian
When I was in 8th grade I was a border at the former Notre Dame International School on the Via Aurelia on the outskirts of Rome. Believe it or not there was a full scale bar inside Vatican City which some American Catholic military personnel and dependants from Camp Darby had donated the barstools for. My parents who worked for the US Army in Livorno and two other Army families, who were friends of ours, would buy hard liquor from the base commissary with our ration coupons and donate cases of it to this bar at Vatican City from time to time.
In fact their sons, Tony and Johnny and I would sometimes deliver the cases by ourselves. We would arrive in St Peter’s square and as you face the basilica, we would pass by the Swiss Guard house on the left. They all knew us after awhile and would wave us to go ahead when we told them we were on our way to see Father Flavian. He was in charge of billeting all the residents and visiting priests at the Vatican City and he would take our whiskey consignment off our hands at the secret bar deep inside the Vatican priests quarters.
On certain days he would be taking confessions inside St Peter’s basilica and we would head for the confessional that said Polish. He was the only priest there at the time taking confessions in Polish. We would whisper through the speaking grate…”Hey father Flavian, are you in there?” And if he were, he would come right out with a big smile and we would all trudge off to Vatican City. We saw where they had a mosaic factory back there and a private garden for His Holiness, the Pope. I was not Catholic and so I was not staggering under the holiness of the place. For me it was like a large playground.
I loved to count the over 700 steps up to the lanterna at the top of the dome and from there the view was spectacular but I was more interested in seeing how far my paper airplane could go and how many minutes it could stay aloft. I also loved to go down in the tunnels under the basilica to view the remains of the original St. Peters Church. It must have been at least seven stories down under the ground and was rather spooky. Vatican City was indeed a world of its own. They had their own passports, Embassies and banking system; The Bank of the Holy Spirit.
Its funny how during the Middle Ages, not only could you give your confession but you could pay dispensation to have so many sins absolved. I don’t know what the going rate was? The Pope in those days was a Prince of State as well as Church as Rome did not originally have its own nobility and had to eventually import them from Naples. In fact I went to school with Prince Paolo Pignatelli, who had had two Pope Innocenti's in his family and were originally from Naples. Being a young red blooded American ignoramus and proud of it, I was not impressed that he was a heriditary Prince and descendant of Popes and I think that was one reason why he liked me and became my buddy. We used to sneak out at night from the dormitory and go out on the football field and shriek communist songs off key at the top of our lungs or on weekends make mischief by calling up local butchers and ordering huge quantities of meat for imaginary parties and never pick it up...we were definately "mascalsoni!"
Anyway Pope’s in the Middle Ages had known illegitimate children who acted as their emissaries and goodwill ambassadors riding out to meet and greet visiting heads of state. It was rather like the Sunni Moslem Caliphate in which the Caliph was elected like the College of Cardinals and was both secular and religious leader. And like the Janissaries, who were Greek crack troops of the Sultan, the Swiss Guard were originally mercenaries who offered their services to the Pope in 1501.
There was no apparent contradiction or separation of secular and religious power in those days and one has only to think of the temporal power of some of the Cardinals like Richelieu and others who hired my favorite Renaissance rapscallion Benvenuto Cellini to make them saphire rings or indeed Pope Julian, who basically kept Michelangelo captive until he finished the Sistine Chapel.
There were so many fascinating things for a young school boy about St. Peters, such as the secret tunnel in the wall between the Vatican and Castel Sant’Angelo, that the Pope could escape to if the Vatican were ever under siege. And Castel Sant’Angelo was full of armor and catapults and halberds and cross bows. I loved the gigantic putti inside the basilica which looked small in the scale of everything around them but upon close inspection the big toe of one of them was as long as your arm. Of all the things to remember from the Vatican museum what sticks in my boyhood memory the most is the spiral staircase of short riser steps wide enough for a row of horsemen to ride up on horseback and then once we hiked to the top to look down and try to land a 50 or 100 lira coin in the large vase at the center of the ground floor. After that it was the statues of the animals that sticks in my mind and perhaps the statue of the human hermaphrodite which every boy found curious.
There was much lore and legend about the Vatican just as there is about Rome. Every Aides of March, someone places a crown of laurel upon the head of the statue of Julius Caesar along the Via Foro Imperiali in front of Forum Julia for example. It has been going on for several centuries by now and no one has ever caught whoever it is or whoever’s descendants it is who places it there. If people keep an all night vigil around the statue, someone slips it on unnoticed from the crowd.
The story I want to share with you about St Peter’s is one about the obelisk which stands in the center of the square. Napoleon had conquered Egypt and gave one of the two obelisks from Luxor to the Vatican, the other is in Paris at La Place dela Concorde. At the time that the one at St.Peters was being erected, a huge crowd gathered in the square to watch. At a certain point during the proceedings, the ropes being used to raise the obelisk began to smoke from friction, while the obelisk hung at a precarious angle over the crowd and surely would have killed many people had the ropes continued to burn. A sailor in the crowd began to shout:”Throw water on the ropes!” Following his instructions they saved the day. As a reward, the Pope gave that sailor and his descendants in perpetuity, the honor of distributing the Palms to the crowd in St. Peters Square every Palm Sunday.
Well I left my initial 10 year sojourn in Rome and Italy in 1966 without having had a chance to say goodbye to Father Flavian but I often thought how happy he must have been when a Polish Pope was elected and finally he would have someone to talk to in his mother tongue….
Cheers,
Brian H. Appleton
When I was in 8th grade I was a border at the former Notre Dame International School on the Via Aurelia on the outskirts of Rome. Believe it or not there was a full scale bar inside Vatican City which some American Catholic military personnel and dependants from Camp Darby had donated the barstools for. My parents who worked for the US Army in Livorno and two other Army families, who were friends of ours, would buy hard liquor from the base commissary with our ration coupons and donate cases of it to this bar at Vatican City from time to time.
In fact their sons, Tony and Johnny and I would sometimes deliver the cases by ourselves. We would arrive in St Peter’s square and as you face the basilica, we would pass by the Swiss Guard house on the left. They all knew us after awhile and would wave us to go ahead when we told them we were on our way to see Father Flavian. He was in charge of billeting all the residents and visiting priests at the Vatican City and he would take our whiskey consignment off our hands at the secret bar deep inside the Vatican priests quarters.
On certain days he would be taking confessions inside St Peter’s basilica and we would head for the confessional that said Polish. He was the only priest there at the time taking confessions in Polish. We would whisper through the speaking grate…”Hey father Flavian, are you in there?” And if he were, he would come right out with a big smile and we would all trudge off to Vatican City. We saw where they had a mosaic factory back there and a private garden for His Holiness, the Pope. I was not Catholic and so I was not staggering under the holiness of the place. For me it was like a large playground.
I loved to count the over 700 steps up to the lanterna at the top of the dome and from there the view was spectacular but I was more interested in seeing how far my paper airplane could go and how many minutes it could stay aloft. I also loved to go down in the tunnels under the basilica to view the remains of the original St. Peters Church. It must have been at least seven stories down under the ground and was rather spooky. Vatican City was indeed a world of its own. They had their own passports, Embassies and banking system; The Bank of the Holy Spirit.
Its funny how during the Middle Ages, not only could you give your confession but you could pay dispensation to have so many sins absolved. I don’t know what the going rate was? The Pope in those days was a Prince of State as well as Church as Rome did not originally have its own nobility and had to eventually import them from Naples. In fact I went to school with Prince Paolo Pignatelli, who had had two Pope Innocenti's in his family and were originally from Naples. Being a young red blooded American ignoramus and proud of it, I was not impressed that he was a heriditary Prince and descendant of Popes and I think that was one reason why he liked me and became my buddy. We used to sneak out at night from the dormitory and go out on the football field and shriek communist songs off key at the top of our lungs or on weekends make mischief by calling up local butchers and ordering huge quantities of meat for imaginary parties and never pick it up...we were definately "mascalsoni!"
Anyway Pope’s in the Middle Ages had known illegitimate children who acted as their emissaries and goodwill ambassadors riding out to meet and greet visiting heads of state. It was rather like the Sunni Moslem Caliphate in which the Caliph was elected like the College of Cardinals and was both secular and religious leader. And like the Janissaries, who were Greek crack troops of the Sultan, the Swiss Guard were originally mercenaries who offered their services to the Pope in 1501.
There was no apparent contradiction or separation of secular and religious power in those days and one has only to think of the temporal power of some of the Cardinals like Richelieu and others who hired my favorite Renaissance rapscallion Benvenuto Cellini to make them saphire rings or indeed Pope Julian, who basically kept Michelangelo captive until he finished the Sistine Chapel.
There were so many fascinating things for a young school boy about St. Peters, such as the secret tunnel in the wall between the Vatican and Castel Sant’Angelo, that the Pope could escape to if the Vatican were ever under siege. And Castel Sant’Angelo was full of armor and catapults and halberds and cross bows. I loved the gigantic putti inside the basilica which looked small in the scale of everything around them but upon close inspection the big toe of one of them was as long as your arm. Of all the things to remember from the Vatican museum what sticks in my boyhood memory the most is the spiral staircase of short riser steps wide enough for a row of horsemen to ride up on horseback and then once we hiked to the top to look down and try to land a 50 or 100 lira coin in the large vase at the center of the ground floor. After that it was the statues of the animals that sticks in my mind and perhaps the statue of the human hermaphrodite which every boy found curious.
There was much lore and legend about the Vatican just as there is about Rome. Every Aides of March, someone places a crown of laurel upon the head of the statue of Julius Caesar along the Via Foro Imperiali in front of Forum Julia for example. It has been going on for several centuries by now and no one has ever caught whoever it is or whoever’s descendants it is who places it there. If people keep an all night vigil around the statue, someone slips it on unnoticed from the crowd.
The story I want to share with you about St Peter’s is one about the obelisk which stands in the center of the square. Napoleon had conquered Egypt and gave one of the two obelisks from Luxor to the Vatican, the other is in Paris at La Place dela Concorde. At the time that the one at St.Peters was being erected, a huge crowd gathered in the square to watch. At a certain point during the proceedings, the ropes being used to raise the obelisk began to smoke from friction, while the obelisk hung at a precarious angle over the crowd and surely would have killed many people had the ropes continued to burn. A sailor in the crowd began to shout:”Throw water on the ropes!” Following his instructions they saved the day. As a reward, the Pope gave that sailor and his descendants in perpetuity, the honor of distributing the Palms to the crowd in St. Peters Square every Palm Sunday.
Well I left my initial 10 year sojourn in Rome and Italy in 1966 without having had a chance to say goodbye to Father Flavian but I often thought how happy he must have been when a Polish Pope was elected and finally he would have someone to talk to in his mother tongue….
Cheers,
Brian H. Appleton