Church of St. Mary of the Oration and Death

A Church dedicated to St. Mary of the dead??????  Where else would one go on All Souls Day to Pray for the dead, other than a Church Dedicated to Our Lady of the Dead???????  Like I have said many times on this blog, Rome always has something interesting around every corner.  Nothing is ordinary in this town!!!  This Church is located on the Via Giulia, one of the nicer streets in Rome.  The street was built by Pope Julius to be a broad avenue leading to St. Peter's Basilica.  Money ran out and construction stopped before it could reach St. Peter's, lucky for us, because it is a very nice street to stroll on without much traffic.  This Church is almost always closed but when occasionally open the crypt is usually locked.  Since it is All Souls and the Brotherhood that operates the Church is dedicated to burying the dead and those drowned in the Tiber River, it was open today as was the Crypt.  You may recall I did a little blog entry on the famous "Bone Church" off the Piazza Barberini which costs 6 or 8  Euro's to enter and no pictures allowed.  Well this Church allows pictures and there is no charge.  These are all real bones, the Brotherhood has buried over 8,000 corpse's in this Church, it ran a cemetery that was largely relocated when the embankments for the Tiber were constructed.

Lest you have to guess, this is the front door, entrance to the Church!

Main door of the Church of St. Mary of Death

Lovely fellow over the main window

what you see as you pass through the portal, Remember life is short!

 This is the Sanctuary Light, skulls everywhere folks!

sanctuary light with skulls around it

 Here is the front of the Pulpit, something to look at during deadly homilies!

Front of the Pulpit

 Here is the Crypt Chapel Holy Water Font!  With a plaque on the wall warning you about death, repent the end is near!

One handed skeleton holy water font.

 One of the many skull themed decorations, this one is a real skull and cross bones set into the plaster of the wall.

'My, what things you have done with this Church decorating!'

 Here is a cross made of skulls.  Talk about Golgatha!

Skull Cross.  The big skull on the Altar is a fake.

 There are all these cases on the walls with skulls in them.  All the glass doors were open for All Souls.

Skull Cases

 In the corners near the Main Altar were these death figures, this one with a sythe.

Angel of death 

 This fellow is still trying to say something, words fail him.  Or he was one of the Choir members.

Preaching or screeching skeleton

 The Chandeliers are all made of bones!  Maybe the fellow above was singing, 'You light up my life, you give me hope to carry on"???

Bone Chandelier

 In those cases you saw above, each skull has the name of the deceased carved on the forehead with the dates of birth and death, on some of them the carved words were filled in with blue ink.  This is Fr. Luigi who died on the 17th of December in 1805.  The cases are segregated according to sex, so the case next to this one was women's skulls. I saw one as recently has 1956.

Fr. Luigi

 This is the plaque on the wall as you descend the staircase.

A reminder to pray for the dead, whom you will soon join!

 More Skull cases.  In Italy the custom is - to bury the dead in a mausoleum above or below ground, after a specified amount of time the deceased is exhumed and any remaining flesh scraped off.  The bones are then re-interned in a family grave or crypt.  This is a very common practice.  If you go back to yesterday's post you will see some square cement lids with names and big iron rings, those are underground vaults where the corpse's are placed and then brought up to be cleaned and then put back in a niche.  We were able to go into a crypt yesterday of the Jesuits and they had just clean out about 12 mausoleum spaces where 3 coffins to a shelf had been, you could still see the outline of the coffins.  The crypts were being prepared for fresh occupants and the former tenants were being re-intered for All Souls Day, a Mass was to be said for them today.

Skull Case

 On our way to the Church we stopped for a Cappuccino, the Barista added some cocoa and a drop of Bailey's Irish Cream, a bit of heaven before we descended to the realm of the dead!

Enjoy life, death is just around the corner, or in our case down the street!

 Since most of the house is off to Malta, about 8 of us went out to dinner for......what else.....Chinese!  What you may ask was the name of the restaurant?  Why it was Ristorante Cinese 63.  A Chinese Buffet of all things run by a very nice Catholic Chinese Family right near St. Peter's.

Chinese Cena

 After all those images of death, here is a very touching image of a Father giving his young son a ride on the shoulders, the boy was just so thrilled to be up so high and kept pointing out all the sights to his Dad, it was La Dulce Vita, Che Gioia, The Sweet life filled with joy!  However short life is we must make the best of it, the best is when we are with family and friends enjoying simple pleasures!

"You must become like little children to enter the Kingdom of Heaven"

Eternal Rest Grant unto them O'Lord and Light Perpetual Shine Upon Them, May they Rest in Peace, Amen!