Holy orders

‘No flash! No flash! Mama mia, four times I tell-a you, ma you do it again!’ The anger of the sacristan of the church of S. Agostino rolled past Caravaggio’s ‘Madonna dei Pellegrini’ and struck a Japanese with a beatific smile fixed under a digital camera who was clicking away in the direction of Bernini’s altar and the ‘Madonna of St Luke’, igniting explosions of light. At the back of the church, meanwhile, a thirty-something woman knelt silently before Sansovino’s ‘Madonna del Parto’, to whom the Romans pray for the safe delivery of a child.

Defending the holiness of Rome’s historic churches is — and probably always has been — a constant battle. I saw skirmishes in most of the 20 or so that I visited in the long weekend I spent there just after Christmas. I got caught in the crossfire myself, in the Chapel of the Holy Relics in Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. I was whispering an explanation of the items on display to my American companions when a man kneeling before the reliquary turned to deliver a far louder ‘Shhhh!’ Moments later, the rebuker was himself rebuked by a priest, for standing so manically close to the glass that protects the objects that are claimed to be pieces of the cross, spines from the crown of thorns, and the finger of Doubting Thomas that he was in danger of setting off the alarm. The atmosphere in the chapel was — well, edgy. There was more nervous expectation than prayerful peace.

I got an insider’s view of the intrusiveness of ecclesiastical tourism when I went to the ten o’clock mass at S. Prassede on the morning of the Epiphany, at which the elevation of the chalice was accompanied not by the ringing of a bell, but by three verses of a tune that is frequently followed by the response, ‘I’m on the train!’ From where I was sitting at the back, I could see a tourist standing before the relic of the pillar of Christ’s scourging, with one hand holding her camera, the other fumbling to silence her diddle-oo-da, diddle-oo-da, diddle-oo-da, dum.