St. Martin of Tours - Patron of Military Chaplains

The Church we walked to this morning was S. Martino ai monti.  The 'Saint Martin' part is easy... the 'ai monti' part wasn't, since it means something to the effect of 'on the mountain-top'.  It wasn't a mountain, of course, but it was a long climb up to the top of the hill where the Church is located. It is a beautiful Church and it is dedicated to several saints, including St. Martin of Tours, who is the patron saint of military chaplains.

I have to write an article for our Military Chaplain publication: Dialogue, so I got my friend to take a bunch of photos - hoping that one of them might be good enough quality to put into print.  I will just put a caption under a few of them so you know what you are looking at... besides me, that is.

The Tomb of St. Martin of Tours, as well as St. Sylvester and others.
 It is in the crypt below the high altar.

The high altar is behind me over my left shoulder.
The crypt is just behind and below where I am standing.

The tomb of St. Martin is in the crypt, just below my left elbow.

Standing in front of the painting of St. Martin of Tours and the beggar.

Before he was a Saint, Martin was a soldier.
In this painting he is giving a beggar half his cloak / cape.
Cape is the word from which we derive the word 'Chaplain'.

Good thing I got my hair cut yesterday before posing for pictures that are going to go into a Military magazine.  With all the grey hair that I am sprouting at my temples, you can't tell if it is really really short on the sides or just not visible.  The lights around this painting were so bright that it is a wonder the camera could capture anything else.

As I was standing under the main Church, near the tomb of St. Martin...

 I noticed on my left a long, gradual stairway leading into a lower section...

At the bottom of the staircase there was a series of rooms from an older building, part of a convent or monastery from a much earlier Church building on this same site:

The 'blue' wall on the left is just because it was so dark down there that my flash lit up the closest wall with light.  The floors were dirt.  From this level, there was another set of stairs going into a crypt but it was roped off.  There are still excavations going on down there.

One of the small rooms in this earlier edifice was a little chapel.  Look carefully at the walls.  You can still see the faded frescoes painted around the central mosaic figure of Mary with a miniature Pope or Prelate, an empty space where the Tabernacle would have been and altar below that.

On the altar, which was a bit broken up, there was still the Altar Stone, and within the Stone, as there must always be, was a relic from one of the Saints to whom the Chapel was dedicated.  I brushed off the dust (as you can see) and there it was.

For those of you who don't really understand this important aspect of Catholic teaching and practice, you may remember the story of Aslan in C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia, and the stone of sacrifice on which Aslan was slain... From the earliest of biblical times, altars were always made of stone, and when they could not be made completely of stone, there was always a stone to top it off.  This is still true in traditional Catholic worship today when the one sacrifice of Christ is re-presented to the Father on an altar of stone.

This afternoon we are going on a tour of the Vatican Museum and the Sistine Chapel.  I can only imagine how fascinating that is going to be.

Oh, and BTW, we are going over to St. Peter's Square a little early because Queen Elizabeth II is coming by for a visit with the Pope so we are going to cheer her on... and then make our way to the Vatican Museum, etc.

More later...