It's a bit of a strange juxtaposition--or at least I thought it so when we walked up--the cross standing here above the arena of the Colosseum. From my own middle-school church history class, the only crosses to exist in the place would have been real ones, not symbols but grotesque instruments of death used for 50,000+ screaming fans.
Our guide claimed this one was placed here in 2000 by Pope John Paul II on a Vatican-proclaimed Year of Jubilee, even though as early as the 19th century Pope Benedict XIV dedicated the place as a sacred sight to honor the memory of the Christian martyrs slain here by flames and crosses and wild animals. It stands here today, she said, because every year on Good Friday there's a processional led by the Vatican.
While we stood right there, she told us Christians weren't persecuted for their faith. Nero could have cared less, she said, what a Christian believed. He needed a political scapegoat on whom to blame the problems of the state, and the most powerless segment of Roman society at that moment were the Christians. The whole bloody mess was just political. . .well, economic, just a matter of power--who had it and who didn't. She likely could guess her Americano customers fully believed downright nasty emperors like Nero hated Christians because they were Christians. Not so, she said, thereby herself bringing down ancient pillars of my own faith.
Nero was just another fat-handed politician, she said. That's the story, just like it always is.
She was sharp and witty and knowledgeable, brimming with personality, a Roman woman with two-tone hair cut sharply around her head--dark eyes, olive skin, just a bit on the other side of thirty maybe. Likeable, attractive, an apologist for her city and its long, long history.
If you were a woman, she told us, pointing upward, you could sit only in the upper deck, lest your comeliness steal away the attention of the real celebrities, the gladiators. I had no idea.
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| Note that cross on the far left. |
For sheer entertainment, Christians played second-fiddle at best, a back-up for the real entertainment. First came the animals--a kind of hunting ritual right there in the Colosseum, greatly beloved; then the Christians were led in and totaled, a warm-up for the real show, the gladiators.
And another thing, she said, the gladiators never fought to the death. No, no, no--good gladiators were hard to come by and far too expensive--there's training and feeding and keeping them in fighting shape. Just think of it--what rich Roman is going to risk his prize fighters's immediate demise? Think of the whole thing as pro wrestling, WWF 50 A.D., and just as phony. Gladiators were cheesecake champs. Look for them--heroes, celebrities--in the mosaics laid in floors of art museums, like this:
Those slaughtered here in the Coliseum, basically, were criminals, she told us. They weren't the Christians. That idea was pedaled for a long time, but sources say it was not true, she said.
That a Christian school teacher in the 1950s would assume the conflict was theological makes all kinds of sense. Back then huge crowds would gather for the annual celebration of the Luther's Wittenburg Door desecration, and, in some quarters at least, even in my family, the Pope was still thought to be the anti-Christ. If you don't believe it, just wait to see what happens in John F. Kennedy, a Catholic becomes President.
Mr. LeFever, at Oostburg Christian, may well have believed what he'd been taught about Christian martyrs, and he likely enjoyed talking about martyrs to pre-adolescent boys whose fertile imaginations were fully capable of recreating the fiery deaths of suffering people praying to God for deliverance. That I thought what I did is understandable.
The whole truth, I suppose, lies somewhere on a continuum between Mr. LeFever's seventh-grade church history version of what happened here in Nero's day and the more sophisticated version of our Roman guide, who reduced all that bloodshed to the quest for political power.
Truth lies, I suppose, somewhere in the middle.
But I'm thankful for that cross, visible here as it is almost everywhere in the Colosseum's ruins. It stands, our guide told us, right there where that evil Nero himself used to sit. Imagine that--right there in the emperor's chair.
What better place might there be?
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