Half an hour before sunrise on Ash Wednesday, hundreds of English-speakers from all over Rome will begin walking to the ancient basilica of St. Sabina on the Aventine Hill. They’ll start from student residences, from embassies to Italy and the Holy See, and from the Vatican. The Schwerpunkt, or focal point, for all this activity is the Pontifical North American College: more than 250 seminarians, student-priests, priest-faculty, and staff, having walked from the Janiculum Hill to the Aventine, will form the largest single contingent at St. Sabina on Ash Wednesday.
That is as it should be. For St. Sabina is the first “station” in the Roman station church pilgrimage of Lent, a tradition dating back to the middle centuries of the first Christian millennium. And the station church pilgrimage, which extends throughout Lent and involves some 40 churches, has become, today, a predominantly Anglophone—indeed, a predominantly American—phenomenon, having been revived for the third millennium by the North American College.
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