With immigrants streaming in from Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia, and the demographics of Italy changed, so has the complexion of its churchgoers. Various parishes have put their facilities at the disposal of foreign worshipers.

Besides the Jewish Tempio Maggiore, the Islamic Moschea di Roma and the Rome Buddhist Vihara anyone with energy and curiosity can now touch base with many of the world's major religions and races in a long day's walk, which include
Ethiopian and Eritrean Coptic Christians at Chiesa di San Tommaso Apostolo, Polish at St. Stanislav, Korean Evangelical services at St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church, Tagalog Masses at Chiesa di San Silvestro, and Congolese Catholics at Chiesa della Natività di Gesù.
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IN CHURCHES, A MOSAIC OF CULTURES

New York Times
By Michael Mewshaw
June 27, 2004

I used to entertain the antic notion that I could walk from one end of Rome to the other by ducking in and out of the city's hundreds of churches. I imagined myself strolling beneath an almost continuous canopy of frescoed ceilings swarming with angels and saints. All around me, I assumed, there would be the familiar figures - black-shawled widows, rambunctious children and devout nuns and priests, everyone Italian except for a few tourists admiring the Caravaggios.

But I've had to revise that picture, because as the demographics of Italy have changed, so has the complexion of its churchgoers. With immigrants streaming in from Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia, various parishes have put their facilities at the disposal of foreign worshipers.

For each of the past few years my wife and I have rented an apartment for a month on the Via del Teatro Pace. Though just two blocks west of the tourist-thronged Piazza Navona, the neighborhood has retained its character, and amid the ice cream emporiums, pubs and souvenir shops, there remain mom and pop grocery stores, tiny cubicles where artisans go about their timeless craft, and antiques sellers who sit amid treasures and trash that have gathered centuries of dust. Next to the fashionable Bar della Pace a bustling, odoriferous open market adds an authentic touch of commedia dell'arte.

But even in this quintessential Italian setting, I couldn't help noticing the presence of extracomunitari, as the immigrants are called. Every Sunday evening, Chiesa della Natività di Gesù throbs with the chants and clapping of Congolese Catholics. Two blocks away at Chiesa di San Tommaso Apostolo, Coptic Christians from Ethiopia and Eritrea fill the Via di Parione, with women in flowing robes and the sounds of drums and reed pipes, all of which provokes bafflement in early morning drinkers at the nearby Abbey Theater Pub.

Farther afield from our apartment, on the Via delle Botteghe Oscure, near the former Communist Party headquarters, Polish Catholics have set up a full-service facility at St. Stanislav's. Parishioners not only have an opportunity to celebrate Mass in their native language. Across the street from the church, they buy newspapers, magazines, canned food and other products from home, and they consult the improvised message board that flutters with notes about jobs, apartments and buses to Warsaw.

The Via XX Settembre, blitzed by traffic, normally resounds with the shrill harmonics of a Formula One race. But in recent years the music from St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church has become more melodious, not to mention more professional. This parish of Scotsmen has welcomed a contingent of Korean evangelicals, many of whom are in Rome to study music composition and opera.

The church with the immigrant congregation that I know best, and the one that has the deepest significance for me, is San Silvestro. Situated in a piazza of the same name, its origins go back to A.D. 761, when Pope Paul I decreed that a church should be built here to house the venerated remains of saints formerly buried in the Catacombs. A relic of the head of St. John the Baptist is said to be kept in the first chapel to the left of the entrance. Reconstructed in the 16th and 17th centuries, the building assumed its present form in the baroque era, and Michelangelo is reputed to have played a role in the design of the high altar. In the late 19th century, after the unification of Italy, the Vatican designated San Silvestro as a parish for English-speaking Catholics.

When I first moved to Rome in the mid-70's, I gravitated there for services in my own language. But what I found wasn't precisely what I had expected. While in the old days San Silvestro catered to Irish, English and Americans, it had by that time acquired a distinctly different accent. Yes, there was, and still are, two Sunday Masses in English, one at 10 a.m., the other at 5:30 p.m. But the English had different cadences and stress patterns, and many of the hymns had a lilt that called to mind the poet James Seay's description of Asians conversing in "the high slant/of their lip song."

San Silvestro, I soon learned, was the home of the Link Community, dedicated to the spiritual needs and practical concerns of the burgeoning numbers of Filipinos who work in Rome as domestics. The singing that had simultaneously confused and enchanted me was in Tagalog. But even the choir's rendering of English-language hymns carried an echo of distant Pacific islands. Seduced "through the ear," to quote Shakespeare, I continued to celebrate Mass at San Silvestro for more than a decade, and as my sons grew, they came with me.

In what would have struck many a Catholic (it emphatically struck this Catholic) as a bizarre family ritual, we passed each Sunday in a series of cross-cultural encounters. First it was off to Mass in English with strong Tagalog overtones. Then along with the rest of the flock, we flooded out into the church's courtyard. "Paradise," I'm told, derives from a Persian word that literally means "walled garden." If so, then the cortile at San Silvestro is certainly a kind of paradise, even if it showcases carved stones instead of flowers. Its walls, which change colors according to the hour, can be as red as a rose or as deliciously mottled as the pulp of a blood orange. Embedded in these walls are ancient chunks of Roman marble, inscribed with Latin. Three tall Corinthian columns and one majestic, fluted Doric pillar stand sentinel on one side. On the other side, a fountain splashes into a time- and weather-worn sarcophagus.

While it's not extraordinary for an Italian church to incorporate Roman ruins into its architecture, San Silvestro is unusual in that these classical pieces came to the church not in the Middle Ages, but little more than a century ago. When William Whitemee, an Irish priest of the Pallottine Order, took charge in 1885, he brought an extra dimension to the job. Besides ministering to souls, he was an avid amateur archaeologist who spent days pawing through the middens of Rome. The cortile is a sort of alfresco museum of what he excavated and hauled back to San Silvestro.

The pillars serve now as leaning posts for members of the Link Community who linger there to exchange gossip. The chipped edge of the sarcophagus is a convenient perch for the Filipino men and women who stay in the courtyard after Mass eating meals of spring rolls and rice.

Tempting though it always was to ask for a sample of their aromatic dishes, I couldn't persuade the boys to give Asian food a try. They preferred the fruit crostatine at a nearby cafe. Then after the first McDonald's in Rome opened near the Piazza di Spagna, they insisted they had a right to their native cuisine every bit as much as the Link Community did. So we incorporated yet another cultural element into our Sunday ritual and bought burgers and fries at the Golden Arches. We continued to do this, eating outdoors on the Spanish Steps in good weather, even after an American matron in sensible walking shoes loudly upbraided me for letting my kids ruin their health with fast food at the same time as they Coca-colonized the country and corrupted Rome.

"Give us a break today," I should have told her. "Nothing can corrupt Rome. The way things go here, McDonald's will probably end up serving bucatini all'amatriciana."

My sons are grown men now and Rome has more than two dozen McDonald's franchises, and neither the Eternal City nor the boys seem the worse for a few burgers. On a recent visit, I returned to San Silvestro to see how it has weathered the years. The square out front still thrums with buses and cabs, and pedestrians hotfoot it through traffic to reach the celebrated shopping streets of the Via Frattina and the Via Condotti. But there have been some temporary changes. The church is under renovation, and an immense billboard advertising tourism in Tunisia covers the scaffolding. Though it might seem sacrilegious to have the facade plastered with pictures of frolicking crowds on camels and kids frisking across beaches, this could also be viewed as another aspect of the church's spirit of inclusiveness.

The Rev. Dennis O'Brien, who had been there in the 70's, was back as rector, and he's a busy man. According to official statistics, Rome's Filipino population is 26,000, but Father O'Brien thinks that the real figure may be five times higher. There's now a Thursday evening Mass in Tagalog, and a full schedule of concerts and receptions and social events. With the help of three other priests, he offers First Communion and Confirmation instructions, and celebrates over 270 weddings a year. "That's a lot of paperwork," he says.

Like any resident of Rome, he has had to learn to live with red tape and the relentless demands of Italian bureaucrats. When I asked about the gaudy billboard over the facade, he wearily recounted a Byzantine tale about finagling construction companies and somnolent work crews. But we ended by agreeing that what happened out in the street mattered less than what went on inside the church and in the souls of its congregation.

As I emerged from San Silvestro, it occurred to me that a trek through Roman churches these days constitutes more than a promenade across the grand breadth and glorious length of city. It has become a microcosmic pilgrimage around the globe. Adding the Jewish Tempio Maggiore, the Islamic Moschea di Roma and the Rome Buddhist Vihara to the mix, anyone with energy and curiosity can now touch base with many of the world's major religions and races in a long day's walk.

Church Services

Chiesa della Natività di Gesù, Piazza di Pasquino, 2.

Chiesa di San Tommaso Apostolo, via di Parione, 33. Services for Ethiopian community 10 a.m. Sunday.

St. Stanislav's, via delle Botteghe Oscure, 15, Sunday Mass is only in Polish. Services are 8, 9 and 10 a.m., noon and 6 p.m.

St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church, via XX Settembre, 7; (39-06) 482-7627. English service at 11 a.m. Sunday. A Korean Evangelical church uses St. Andrew's for Mass at 7 a.m., 2 and 4 p.m. Sunday.

Chiesa di San Silvestro, Piazza San Silvestro, 1; (39-06) 679-7775. English Masses on Sunday at 10 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. Tagalog Mass on two Thursdays each month at 5:30 p.m.

Tempio Maggiore, Lungotevere Cenci; (39-06) 684 00 61.

Moschea di Roma, Viale della Moschea; (39-06) 808 22 58.

Rome Buddhist Vihara, via Mandas, 2; (39-06) 224 600 91.

MICHAEL MEWSHAW'S latest novel, "Island Tempest," will be published this fall by Putnam.