60 Churches. 1 Semester.

I recently discovered the guidebook entitled Sacred Places: Rediscovering the Churches of Rome. An Epic Journey through Sixty Churches in Eleven Walks by Gregory J. Pulles sitting on a bookshelf at the Bernardi Campus. I was immediately intrigued how an author could 1) Choose only 60 churches out of 900+ total Roman churches 2) Visit that many churches and get enough information to make a complete guidebook on it and 3) Create a guidebook that fulfilled something I did not know I wanted to do. Before I came to Rome, I knew that I wanted to take in as much art, religion, and culture as sanely possible. Experiencing Rome itself can and is very overwhelming at times because there are so much of those three things that I did not know where to start. I decided to use this guidebook as a goal and starting point for my Roman adventures. I want to visit churches because most of the artistic style choices are ones that I really appreciate and want to learn and see more of. I also want to because as a new Catholic, I really feel that Rome is the place where I can sink my soul into the wonders of heaven. Everywhere you turn there is something that ties into Catholicism or faith in general and that really just makes me excited. As I said before, Rome has more than 900 churches. That is at least 900 places where the Holy Trinity lives and where the Eucharist is available. The more time I spend in churches, the more time I get to spend with Jesus himself and all of his devout followers (dead and alive). I have been in Rome for 3 weeks now and I can just feel myself yearning to be closer to Him and realizing how important my faith is to me. Faith while traveling is a hard task and takes a lot of commitment, time, and awareness to make it part of your daily routine and a priority.

My favorite way of travel is to go to a place, know where you want to go but have no other background information. No idea of what exactly is inside a museum or church or historical place. Go into it completely blank so you can feel the full extent of what is there, no expectations. There is something so powerful about entering a place and not knowing exactly what you will find in there. This is something that is hard for me to do because I usually like to know everything that there is to know about what I am going to see. This does not aid me well always because then I find myself not paying attention to what is around me and more focused on taking pictures (imagine that) than enjoying what is around me. I decided to implement this “expect the unexpected” type of mindset when I am visiting these churches. I plan on walking to and around all of these places of worship. By doing this, I hope to become more aware of what is around me, appreciate the intricacies that makeup Rome and stumble upon things I would not have thought about going to before. Therefore, I will be using the guidebook just as a reference of what churches to go to and only after going there I will read the information given about that specific church.

I have decided to create a separate blog post where I will be constantly updating what churches I have visited on what days. I will be putting the ones that I found from the guidebook in Italics and will keep a running tally of the number of churches/holy places I have been to while abroad! This will be a great resource for me to look back on and for you to stay updated with where I have been AND where you should go when you come to Rome ;)

“Christ does not force our will; He takes only what we give him. But he does not give himself entirely until he sees that we yield ourselves entirely to him.” -St Teresa of Avila