Old and New

This afternoon I decided to visit the Basilica di San Valentino in Terni. Valentino was a bishop here and was martyred just outside Rome. This was a long time ago, and there is a lot of conjecture, with several churches claiming a link to St Valentine.

Anyway, it sounded like a good photo to have in the album, so I caught the bus to the basilica on the southern outskirts
of Terni.

When I arrived, there were a lot of young students hanging around, having just finished classes for the day. The basilica next door only had a couple of visitors, and I was thinking of taking a photo of the altar, which had a statue of St Valentine under it.

At that point, a couple of priests appeared and seemed to be preparing the altar for Mass (it was about 5pm by this time.)

When the bells started ringing, a woman stated to lead the congregation in the rosary, and a priest distributed copies of evening prayers for the feast day of today, the Archangels Michael, Gabriel and Raphael.
After the rosary, 5 priests came in and began the vespers and Mass. I discovered later that they are Carmelite monks, all originally from Kerala in India. As it happened, their leader is called Fr Raphael, so after Mass he distributed to the congregation the sweets he had been given for his name day.
There were about 30 or 40 in the congregation, and the affection they had for this group of priests was obvious. These evening prayers are held regularly. The priests serve the community who live in the surrounding apartment blocks.

I spoke to a couple of them afterwards (being Indian, they were impressed by my surname). Because of the lack of priests, this monastery was almost closed, until the priests were sent from India. They knew of a similar congregation in Sydney.

The story about the students next door is that Garibaldi closed the monastery and turned it into a university faculty of science and politics. (Being Italy, this is regarded as a "recent" event.). Not many people wanted to do science and politics, so it has been turned into an economics faculty. The monks now live in another building next door.

I noticed that there was a photo of a young woman called Guilia Ciani on one of the side altars. She was a member of the choir and 5 years ago was killed in a motorcycle accident. A tragedy for the family, especially since she was an only child. In her memory, the parish has started a charity to help people in Malawi. One of the priests said that, strictly speaking, there shouldn't be a photo on an altar, but they let it pass because of what it means to the people of the parish.

After all of that, my 10 minute stop to get the joke shot of Saint Valentine turned into a 2 hour stay and a bit of an insight into the community as it is today, not in 200AD.

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