Midnight Mass in St. Peter’s

Tuesday, December 24, 1991

In the early afternoon of Christmas Eve we arrived in Rome. We gathered our bags at the train station and caught a cab outside. We may have been groggy from the overnight train ride, but that excursion in the cab got our blood pumping faster than a double expresso.

My sister, Nancy, remembers: “We took a taxi from the train station to our hotel. The taxi driver was mad and I thought we were going to get into an accident.” “They have no traffic rules there (or so it seemed). It was a pretty scary cab ride.” “We passed Circus Maximus but didn’t really get to see it.” For me the ride felt like a roller coaster where our driver was just trying to avoid the cars since the brakes where missing. I remember looking out the right side of the cab and seeing a long open space and thinking it must be the Circus Maximus. It seemed quite amazing that we could pass something so historic so closely.

At the hotel it was very much how you could imagine living in Rome. A rather small room with a window into a shared open space. As Nancy remembers: “The hotel room was nice but had those strange European outlets. We had a window you could open like French doors for a pseudo-balcony. Out the window were lines of laundry and a woman singing an Italian song. Dad washed his socks in the sink and put them to dry by the balcony (matched the lines of laundry). On the TV was some weird game show that looked hilarious but was all in Italian so none of us could understand it.” I remember they had an advertisement for “Foxy” toilet tissue where actors would run the tp over a microphone with their heads lifted and eyes closed like they were smelling some wonderful scent in the air. It was quite bizarre.

We quickly learned of one of the difficulties of being in Rome around Christmas. Not only do they have supper later in the day, but very few restaurants were open over the holidays. If I remember right, my father had planned for us to go to St. Peter’s in order to try and see midnight mass. We got there around 6pm in the evening and went over to the nearby shops. I think it was partly to get souvenirs and partly to grab something to eat for then and for later. Nancy remembers: “There was a trinket shop across the street from St. Peter’s that sold all sorts of religious stuff, some of it quite amusing.” “I thought we got some sort of potato bread (or something equally dry and tasteless) to tide us over for the long wait at St. Peter’s.”

We then joined the line for Midnight Mass. If memory serves, we had gotten there so early that we were toward the front of the line. My father remembers “that we took a train to St Peters and walked up to the Swiss Guard post and asked about tickets to Midnight Mass. The guard said that they were all gone but we could stand in line for Standing Room.” We stood in line for 5 hours and were let in an hour before the mass began. We scrambled in when it was our turn and found a spot one bay from the front on the left side with a view of the alter. As Nancy remembers that there was a “woman from California that spoke to the guards in Italian and prompted us to move our spot to one where we could not see the altar but then we saw the Pope up close when he visited the manger during the offertory.” We were standing up against some temporary guardrails where they said the people on the other side would be cleared out at some point so that the Pope could pass to place the Baby Jesus in the nativity scene. My father remembers: “When we moved to the other side of the horses with others coming in behind us and looking at us strangely as we could not see the altar thinking- ‘Why are they standing THERE?’”

It was tough because in order to see the alter, we had to stand on our tip toes and crane our necks around a pillar. Plus the mass is something close to a 2 hour affair (keep in mind we had already spent 5 hours waiting outside and another hour inside). But that all paid off at the end of the mass. As they had said, the crowd on the other side of the guardrail were pushed out of the way and we were left right next to an open passageway. The Pope came down the center aisle, turned right towards us, and passed just out of arms length. I remember being blinded by the flashes of the people on the other side of the passageway. And then on top of it he came back and passed right in front of us again. Though this time he stopped, signed autographs, and had his picture taken with everyone. (just kidding).

As you can expect we were amazed by having been able to see him that closely. We were elated. After the mass ended, the cathedral emptied rather quickly and we stayed for a bit to look around since we really hadn’t seen much more than what we could see from our position during the mass.

When we exited the church and started heading across the square and down the boulevard back toward Rome, you could sense the good feeling in the air and it was quite magical. Nancy remembers: “I remember leaving St.Peter’s after midnight mass and as we walked all the way back to our hotel a large group of young Mexican school children came up behind us singing songs in Spanish. That was pretty cool.” That night was easily the highlight of the trip.