In Life, In Death

While on my last trip to Italy, I visited a place I had been wanting to see for quite some time, called the Capuchin Crypt in Rome. This crypt is located under the Holy Mary of the Conception of the Capuchins church, which was constructed by the Franciscan Capuchin Friars in the year 1626. In 1631, Cardinal Antonio Barberini, OFMCap, ordered the remains of thousands of Capuchins to be exhumed and transferred to the crypt below the church.

Today, there are remains of about 4,000 bodies there, but that’s not what is significant about this place. What is significant is that rather than having the bones entombed or buried in the ground as in almost all other crypts, they are instead arranged along the walls and ceiling of the crypt to create decorative motifs and religious depictions, making a hauntingly beautiful display. When passing amongst these remains, a visitor is greeted with a Memento Mori plaque that reads, “What you are now, we used to be. What we are now, you will be.”

Columns of stacked skulls, rows of arranged vertebrae, and collections of interlocked pelvises, all arranged to create images and architectural features one would find decorating a church, such as flowers, a crown, arches, stars, crosses, and angels. Skeletons are dressed in the religious habits of a Franciscan laying in niches made of femurs and others standing in alcoves of skulls, looking as if in contemplative prayer, while holding a cross in their bony hands. It's a sight unlike anything else that invites reflection on the life of each of these people, and upon one’s own life.

These bodies, once like us covered with flesh and imbued with a soul, served Our Lord in their vocation to religious life, pointing through their word and deed towards heaven. They dedicated their life to building up God’s Holy Church, beautifying it and filling it with their poverty and holiness to help guide those around them on the journey to Heaven. How beautiful it is that now, even in death, they do the same! While they can no longer talk to us, their bodies still speak of the heavenly realities, the human condition, and the interplay of the two. They beautify the Church physically through the decoration and metaphysically through a enduring witness of love for Christ.

In life and death, these monks teach the faithful that what exists in this world is all for naught, as we were reminded just a few weeks ago: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return”. We do not exist for this world and its treasures, but only for God. May we embrace the cross as the skeletons of these monks do, as Christ himself does during Holy Week, remembering the words of the great hymn O God Beyond all Praising: “The flower of earthly splendor in time must sure die, its fragile bloom surrender to you our God most high, but hidden from all nature the eternal seed is sown, though small in mortal stature, to heaven’s garden grown: for Christ, your gift from heaven, from death has set us free, and we through him are given the final victory.”