CATHOLICS SEEKING an indulgence by climbing the Holy Stairs, which Jesus reputedly mounted before his crucifixion, may soon be asked to make a contribution to save the fixture’s flaking frescoes.
Every year two million pilgrims in Rome get on their knees to shuffle up the 28 marble steps which tradition states once led to the room in Jerusalem where Pontius Pilate judged Christ before they were shipped to Italy in the fourth century.
Wooden boards protect the steps, with small openings revealing where Christ’s blood reportedly stained the marble.
Researchers have warned the elaborate 16th-century frescoes that line the stairs and depict the passion of Christ and the crucifixion are fast disintegrating.
“Plaster is detaching, there has been water infiltration, some paintwork is fading. Other parts are darkening due to soot from candles and we lack funding,” said Mary Angela Schroth, an art curator who has studied the frescoes and is campaigning to raise the €1.6 million needed to safeguard them.
Funding from the Getty Foundation has been used up in studies and on the restoration of just one chapel in the sanctuary where the steps are housed, next to the basilica of St John Lateran. The lack of further income prompted the plan to ask for a small donation from pilgrims.
"It's painful to see the frescoes in this state," said Fr Tito Amodei, a member of the Passionists, the black-robed order that runs the site. "If just one pilgrim in two contributed a euro, the restoration could easily go ahead," he told Corriere della Sera.
Climbing the steps earns an indulgence, which the church teaches can reduce time in purgatory once believers have confessed and been absolved of their sins. Outrage over the selling of indulgences in the Catholic church helped prompt the Protestant Reformation and it is banned today.
Ms Schroth said offering a euro at the Holy Stairs to aid restoration would not be compulsory. “There will be a small table where we answer questions and suggest a contribution, that’s it,” she said. “The Passionists are more of a mystical order than businessmen and were reluctant to do this, so we worked hard to convince them.”
Yesterday Pope Benedict led Roman Catholics into Holy Week celebrations, telling a Palm Sunday crowd that man will pay the price for his pride if he believes technology can give him the powers of God.
Under a splendid Roman sun, the German pope presided at a colourful celebration where tens of thousands of people waved palm and olive branches to commemorate Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem the week before he was crucified. The pope, who turned 84 on Saturday, wove his sermon around the theme of man’s relationship with God and how it can be threatened by technology. “From the beginning, men and women have been filled – and this is as true today as ever – with a desire to ‘be like God’, to attain the heights of God by their own powers,” he said.
“Mankind has managed to accomplish so many things: we can fly. We can see, hear and speak to one another from the farthest ends of the Earth. And yet the force of gravity which draws us down is powerful.”
While the great advances of technology have improved life for man, he said, they have also increased possibilities for evil, and recent natural disasters were a reminder, if any were needed, that mankind is not all-powerful.
If man wanted a relationship with God, he had to first "abandon the pride of wanting to become God", said the pope, celebrating his sixth Easter season as the leader of the world's 1.2 billion Roman Catholics. After the Mass, the pope appealed for peace in Colombia, calling for wide participation in a day of prayer for the victims of violence to be held there on Friday. "Enough of violence in Colombia. May she live in peace," he said. – ( Guardian, Additional reporting: Reuters)