Rome Study Abroad: January 2022
By The Rev. Dr. Matthew S.C. Olver, Assistant Professor of Liturgics and Pastoral Theology; Director of St. Mary's Chapel
Two years ago, a group of 24 students and pilgrims participated in Nashotah House’s first study- abroad course in Italy. In January 2022, Nashotah House and The Living Church Institute will host the course “Christian Unity in Rome: Anglican Ecclesiology and Ecumenism.”
In January 2020, the course took place at the Anglican Centre in Rome, which houses the Archbishop of Canterbury’s permanent representative to the Holy See. Situated to overlap with the week of prayer for Christian Unity, the course drew residential and distant students not only from Nashotah House, but also from Virginia Theological Seminary (including their renowned New Testament Scholar, the Rev’d Dr. John Yieh, who led one of the course sessions), Asbury Seminary, and Yale Divinity School, plus pilgrims drawn from across the Anglican world, including a number of Nashotah alumni. The course focused on primary texts in ecclesiology, beginning with Augustine, Richard Hooker, and John Jewel, and then examined the development of Anglican ecclesiology in the twentieth century through the lens of the ecumenical heart that has shaped it, especially its dialog with the Roman Catholic Church (ARCIC). One of the sessions was held at the Centro Pro Unione, a Catholic ecumenical center founded after Vatican II, where many ecumenical delegates to the council met regularly and where the texts of some of the council’s key documents were drafted. Like residential students at the House, the group joined daily to pray the Offices and to celebrate the Eucharist.
The trip was also designed as a spiritual pilgrimage. The first morning was spent in the Catacombs of St. Sebastian, where they celebrated Mass at the tomb where the saint's relics were found. The next day, they joined Pope Frances who presided over Vespers to open the Week of Prayer at St. Paul’s Outside the Walls, a church erected by Constantine over the burial place of the apostle and one of the four major basilicas of Rome. The group was guided by renowned historians through St. Peter’s Basilica, the excavations beneath the Basilica where the saint’s relics were discovered, the Vatican Museums, the Sistine Chapel, and the Colosseum. The group also made a pilgrimage to a location that archeologists recently confirmed as the spot St. Paul was held under house arrest. The group received a tour of Sant’Anselmo, the mother house of the Benedictine Order and the location of its pontifical university, by the Abbot Primate himself, Dom Gregory Polan. Fr. Anthony Currer, the staff member who coordinates relations with the Anglican Communion and the World Methodist Council, welcomed us to the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, shared with us about the current dialogue, and took questions from students. On the final day, the group made a pilgrimage to the relics of the Anglican Martyrs of Melanesia, which are housed in the Church of San Bartolomeo. This church was re-dedicated by Pope John Paul II to the martyrs of the twentieth century and contains relics of Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Anglican martyrs from around the world, some as recent as just three years ago. That night, the course concluded with Choral Evensong at All Saints’, the Church of England parish in Rome.
One of the gifts of the course was the opportunity for Nashotah House to partner with a wide variety of institutions: the Anglican Centre in Rome; Virginia Theological Seminary; the Centro Pro Unione, where students heard a lecture by Dr. Paul Gooder, a major lay New Testament scholar from the Church of England and a member of ARCIC; the Episcopal parish in Rome, St. Paul’s Within the Walls, and Rome’s Church of England parish, All Saints’; and the community of Sant’Egidio, a lay Catholic movement that serves the poor and marginalized in Rome, facilitates international peace negotiations, and leads daily services of prayer at major churches around Rome that draws hundreds of people each night.
The course was led by two Nashotah faculty members who will be returning again in January 2022. The Rev. Dr. Matthew S. C. Olver is the Assistant Professor of Liturgy and Pastoral Theology, and was the Ecumenical Officer for the Diocese of Dallas and a member of the Anglican-Roman Catholic Dialogue in the US (ARCUSA) from 2006-2014, which produced the agreed statement “Ecclesiology and Moral Discernment.” Dr. Christopher Wells is an Affiliate Professor of Theology and the Executive Director of The Living Church Foundation and Magazine, and is the theological advisor to ARCUSA.
We hope you will consider joining us in January 2022. Information and registration information may be found at this link: https://nashotah.edu/rome. Please note registration is limited to 20 students and 20 non-students.