ROME, Simon Donnelly. Tonight spring came to Rome. I walked up our road, the looooong Via Cassia, choked in early evening traffic, significantly overdressed in my dark coat and Italian scarf (you know, those grey ones with crazy tartan-style squares all over them). I felt almost Italian, and very happy.

To be fair, spring may have come sometime in the last few days. I wouldn’t really know, because my seminary community just came back today from a six-day retreat in a tiny mountain town 55km (35 miles) south-east of the capital (San Polo dei Cavaglieri, near the more famous Tivoli).

Coming back from a silent retreat is an interesting experience: you feel freedom to be back in your home! You can talk again! You can go and do your own thing. And yet, there is a certain unbearable lightness of being that you bring back from a retreat. "You seem calm", said our quiet, ever wise, Croatian Franciscan sisters tonight. Given that I am usually just inches away from being hyperactive, being called "tranquillo" by them was quite something.

They were right, I think. Spending a week in the undiluted company of the Lord is a beautiful experience. We were all able to  shut out the deafening noise of people and machines that are our normal company in this great (and crazy!) city at the heart of the church and the world.

The privilege to live in this city, full of chaos and holiness

So, there I was, ambling along the choked Via Cassia — being tranquillo, I suppose. And I realised for the thousandth time what an extraordinary privilege it is to live in this mad, mad city, full of holiness and chaos. It is a time in one’s life to cherish and give thanks for. I would never have dreamed in my wildest dreams that I would end up living near the headquarters of the church.

Bear in mind, I live about 12km (7 miles) from Saint Peter’s. That’s still inside the giant circle of freeways called the Gran Raccordo Annulare (‘Great Ring Road’), but it’s no longer in the centre. This is most definitely new Rome. Well, newish Rome. Certainly not old Rome. Our road that I was walking along, the Via Cassia, was built for Roman military foot traffic 100 years before our Lord and Saviour walked the earth, but the houses here are all 20th century.

The road is choked by traffic nearly 24 hours a day. It was rush hour — a very vague term in Rome, given that every hour is rush-time — and the traffic was standing. I walked with a certain triumph past several stationary buses. I tried not to fall into potholes, and kill myself under the wheels of hilariously undisciplined motor scooters (motorini) — of which there are 600 000 in Rome, I heard last week!!

Very holy is so often right next to very pagan.

I walked past the tiny cinema not far up our road. There was a film showing called something about Love, which I imagined for a Schoenstatter could be a Father Kentenich handbook on the Covenant of Love with our Blessed Mother! Like so often in Italy, though, I just wearily kept walking. Very holy is so often right next to very pagan. It’s a real challenge to the children of the Church, how we should best respond to this.

There were spring buds on the jasmine trees in San Polo these past days, and in Rome too. A beautiful giddy happiness is starting to flow into the eternal city, a lightness of being that is always part of spring mornings and spring nights in Rome. It seems right for Holy Week, I must say. We Catholics know that the next few days will hold the great happiness of Holy Thursday, the feast day of every priest. Then, the terrible darkness of Good Friday. But last of all the great feast of the risen Christ will come very soon.

The feast of all who suffer

As the world knows, the Holy Father is not well. And we in my college will miss him especially when we serve at the papal altar at the Good Friday afternoon commemoration of the Lord’s passion and death, in Saint Peter’s Basilica. But we know the Pope will follow the proceedings from his hospital room. He will pray for us, which is a great privilege and joy. He suffers, even as we commemorate Our Lord’s suffering. He unites his suffering with that of suffering people all over the world.

Good Friday is really the feast of all who suffer, be it in mind or in body. I’m sure every Easter of the exile years must have been a time of particular hardship for Father Kentenich, away from his foundation. But the joy of the homecoming was to follow!

Some of us watched the video of the Passion of the Christ in my seminary tonight. Death will never win. The most powerful moment for me is the glimpse of the Saviour rising from his tomb in the last moments of the film. What an extraordinary life and faith we are called to live!