The Colosseum Before Mussolini's Modernist Desecration

Santa Maria della Pietà al Colosseo

In 1749, Pope Benedict XIV conscious that the Colosseum was a sacred site where early Christians had been martyred, consecrated the building to the Passion of Christ and installed Stations of the Cross, declaring it sanctified by the blood of the Christian martyrs who perished there. The centuries old history of the pre-secularist, Catholic, Via Sacra, Roman Forum and Colosseum is greatly neglected, though there are many Roman Catholics who painfully remember the destruction of that ancient Roman neighborhood and the displacement of the houses and people and sacred elements there, of which the Chiesa di Santa Maria della Pietà al Colosseo (moved, who knows where) was a centerpiece.

The Popes of my lifetime have continued the Good Friday Via Crucis there, but the Via Crucis monuments are all gone and no Catholics are allowed where for centuries they went with great devotion. Shame. A glaring monument testimony in architecture to the the modern philosophical preference of ridding the world of Catholic history and tradition, preferring a dead and largely imaginary, re-invented and phony pagan past of dead and useless stone, a testament to a civilization which died, to cherishing and preserving and promoting the present and living faith of Christian culture which is still quite alive, even in a Europe and world that at best tries to ignore it. I, for one, reject the modernist cult of ruins. It baffles me why humanity should worship places and ruins used by our ancestors rather than living there too and using and worshiping God on those places, as our forebears have done.

N.B. Colosseum restoration

Altar of the Chair Before Virgilio Cardinal Noè Demolition