There is something about Rome that stays with you, and it’s not the breathtaking sweep of Bernini’s colonnade or the haunting power of Michelangelo’s Pietà.
I spent days wandering the cobbled streets of this majestic city wondering what it was. I finally figured it out on my last morning in Rome, coming by chance upon one of Rome’s smaller basilicas, the San Giovanni dei Fiorentini.
I sat there in the dimly lit quiet, before a relic of Mary Magdalene, next to elderly Italians, their eyes closed in deep prayer. They shared the silence and the stillness, oblivious to the grandeur around them.
Mother Teresa once said that the fruit of silence is prayer, and the fruit of prayer is faith. Rome’s beauty is astonishing, but Rome’s lived, prayerful silence is something else. It’s a silence that is powerful – inviting you to pause, to breathe, and to notice.
I had come to Rome as part of a St Vincent de Paul Society delegation for an international Vincentian pilgrimage. The global Vincentian family had brought together homeless families from Brazil, Chile, Peru, Syria, Senegal, Italy and Australia – each of whom had received a home through the ‘13 Houses’ Jubilee Project.
These families had travelled extraordinary distances not just geographically, but also emotionally, to be there.
The Australian contingent consisted of Nadia, a Bangladeshi-Australian mother, and her bubbly 18-month-old daughter, Alisha, whose favourite pastime, it seemed, was dancing to “Baby Shark.”
Watching Pope Leo hand Nadia a symbolic bronze key – designed by Timothy Schmalz of Homeless Jesus fame – was moving. The key was oversized, weighty, ceremonial. But what it symbolised was even heavier: dignity, stability, hope.
None of the families spoke the same language, yet somehow they all understood one another. They shared stories in their mother tongues, and even without translation you could see how the human heart recognises suffering and resilience.
A Brazilian man from Curitiba, who had endured 27 years sleeping rough, was seen by his fellow pilgrims carefully arranging cardboard on street corners.
When asked what he was doing, he simply shrugged and replied, “This is someone’s bed. I know. I have been there.”
Another woman, from Ukraine, was on her first trip abroad after losing her husband in the war. Still traumatised, she found herself slowly relaxing among people she could not even speak to, later saying, “I never thought it could be so peaceful and joyful among people you don’t even understand.”
These were the faces and stories behind World Day of the Poor.
And in a world where 1.6 billion people are homeless or living in slums, their stories represent millions more. The statistics are staggering – 122,000 Australians are homeless today – but statistics rarely bring you to tears. People do.
A few months earlier, I had been in Timor-Leste. In the margins and the poorest corners, I found a vibrant and joy filled church.
It was among the orphans of Lospalos, the street children of Baucau, the welcoming families living on very little that I discovered what Scripture means when it tells us Christ is found in the margins and the periphery.
And in Rome, in those basilicas where the poor of the world gathered, I found something different.
A silence that was profound. A fraternity that didn’t need words. A sense that Christ is not just found in the margins but among the marginalised sitting as they do under beautiful frescoes, inviting all of us into the silence that leads to faith.
Pat Garcia is St Vincent’s Health Australia group general manager of public affairs and general counsel.