If Stones Could Speak, by Regis Martin

When I first arrived in Rome back in the mid 1980s, accompanied by a wife and two small children, we lived for a time just outside the city walls, along the subway tracks that would take me each day to the University of St. Thomas, the Angelicum, where I was doing doctoral studies in Sacred Theology. During those early-morning commutes into the historic center, there was always the same spectacle waiting to be seen—this immense, looming structure standing ever before my eyes as I left the subway station to begin the steep climb up to the university.

I never tired of looking at it or thinking about it. What did it mean? What possible relevance did this huge pile of stone and cement have in a world so vastly different from the one where it had first been seen, begun and completed less than a century following the birth of Christ?  …

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