Sant'Ignacio di Loyola in Campo Marzio
Questions in a Jesuit shrine Into this place as if a garden
I come again in reverence for the deceased men of God in this grid of memorial tombs. It is a Counter-Reformation opera in scenes of prison, rope, and torture, with martyrs in dramatic martyrdom. Here are black-robes known as Ours. At the close of the last day will they like us want to see our own bodies in another. surprising form, whatever being glorified can even mean? Now within our noisy carnival of dread do they all still weep as we often do sleeping fitfully with the poetry of these markers? They taught us the meaning of the soul is the soul itself, and the turning womb of these, our graves, prepares a breech birth. When the angel musician blows a golden horn, and in a terrible twinking graves open up like missile silos eyeing the last sky above these narrow holding cells before moving to the main arena where the wily lions have had all their piercing teeth removed, we learn the true task of the dead is to make new again what we once thought as only our ordinary rounds but now to join in a live performance. Will each of us think in that new light it resembles a vast wedding breakfast, where we will serve other guests easily, freed from sorrow in this vale of tears? |
This church began as a shrine to glorify St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, just four years after this Basque saint's canonization. Modeled after Il Gesu, the Jesuit church built in the century before, this Baroque edifice, originally designed by a Jesuit mathematician, lays out a long nave with interconnected side chapels and tombs of Jesuit saints. The open space allows for preaching to large crowds. A striking, theatrically vivid ceiling fresco was done by Andrea Pozzo, who also painted the church's trompe l'oeil dome, since there was not enough money for a real dome. The central motif of the ceiling fresco is Christ imparting light to Ignatius who in turn extends it to all the continents depicted by symbols in the vaults, celebrating global Jesuit missions.