One of the frustrations has to do with a Roman attitude best expressed not by words but by a shrug of the shoulders.
My most daunting experience with that attitude occurred a half dozen years ago when tried to return a car I had rented to visit my family in Campania.
I had an agreement with the rental agency to return the car on a Saturday-June 29-but when I got back to Rome at midday, I found the agency closed.
I went into an adjacent police substation to inquire about it, and I was told, in a tone that implied that I should know better than to ask, that it was the “feast of Sts. Peter and Paul.”
When I asked when the agency would reopen, the officer shrugged and said, “Chi lo sa?” - “Who knows?”
Since I was due to board a train at 10 the following morning, I made several attempts to turn over the car to someone competent, but I was greeted everywhere with the same explanation: “the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul.”
I returned the car the next morning just in time to catch my train.
In the process, I learned that June 29 is a public holiday in Rome, although not everyone takes it as seriously as the auto rental agents, who must be exceptionally devout.
The same date, of course, is observed by the Church as the Solemnity of Sts. Peter and Paul, a more serious affair than the civil observance seems to be.
In spite of the inconvenience, there is no more appropriate place to be on June 29 than the city that is associated with these two colossal figures in the history of Christianity.
And they are, of course, colossal-both of them, though under very different circumstances, called by Jesus himself to play pivotal roles in the early life of the Church. “He who worked through Peter as his apostle among the Jews,” Paul wrote to the Galatians, “had been at work in me for the Gentiles.”
And yet, in spite of that distinction, Peter and Paul are particularly approachable saints, because their journeys to Rome began on the path of human weakness – Peter’s vacillation when he was “accused” of being a friend of Jesus and Paul’s ruthlessness in persecuting the early disciples.
Nor were Peter and Paul free from human foibles during their years of ministry, as we read in the New Testament.
We can see their stone images in St. Peter’s Square, but these men were flesh and blood.
They were flesh and blood, and yet they persisted in their vocations even when the price was death.
They were flesh and blood, which means that they were like us, and we like them.
They were called by Jesus in person, as it were, to live the Gospel themselves and to spread it wherever they could.
We’re like them in that, too-not called by Jesus face-to-face but called anyway, and with no less urgency, to persist in the faith despite ourselves to be the apostles of our own time.
“Let us embrace what they believed,” St. Augustine wrote, “their life, their labors, their sufferings, their preaching and their confession of faith.’’
Charles Paolino is a member of the RENEW staff and a permanent Deacon in the Diocese of Metuchen.