Sunday, May 17, 2009

Monte Celio, Mother Theresa

Una and I went for a Sunday stroll to break up our reading and journaling in the apartment. Sundays are big park days for folks in Rome, so we thought we'd head up to nearby Villa Celimontana to see how jumping it is on a hot weekend day. The villa is located on one of Rome's seven hills, Monte Celio, and like so many places in this city, there's a lot of stuff to see aside from the park area.

We walked alongside an outside wall of the park on Via di San Paolo della Croce, and I continued down Clivo di Scauro to San Gregorio Magno (above). In the center of the piazza outside San Gregorio Magno sits a bust of Mother Theresa. The inscription on its base indicates the bust was a gift from India, although I'm having a difficult time researching the impetus for such a gift (certainly we can safely assume something Catholic is going on here).

So many of the busts one encounters in her explorations of Rome are ancient and seemingly meant to honor some masculine legacy of imperialism. Sure, there's the classic figure of the Virgin Mary who has her fair share of makeshift altars and honorary portraiture throughout the city, but Mother Theresa is posted, in one way or another, at several sites, as a significant contemporary female figure of Catholicism that Pope John Paul II put on the "fast track" to sainthood shortly after her death by nominating her for beatification. It's interesting to think about where the memory of Mother Theresa stands six years after beatification and four years after the death of Pope John Paul II.



Check out a couple of good articles for comparison published when she was beatified in 2003, from the BBC and everyone's favorite Atheist, Christopher Hitchens.

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