c. 1996 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY (RNS)-As ancient Rome prepares for the third Christian millennium, one thing is already clear. The celebration will be no Roman holiday-not for the guests and not for the hosts.

When Pope John Paul II, the putative master of ceremonies, recently observed that in Christianity “time has a fundamental importance,” he clearly wasn’t referring to the city inhabited by most of his 261 predecessors.

Living up to their well-earned reputations, the citizens of eternally late Rome have already massaged or missed deadlines they set to accommodate the influx in 2000 of some 40 million pilgrims for the 2,000th anniversary of the birth of Jesus. That’s about eight times the number of tourists that visit Rome each year.

Across the Tiber River in the Vatican, the pope is intensely focused on the “Great Jubilee,” saying it has become the core of his ministry.

The church observes jubilees, or holy years, every 25 years, a custom that Christians adopted from Jewish law in the 14th century. Popes observe the year by granting special benefits, known as indulgences, for pilgrims who come to Rome and perform other religious acts.

John Paul has called on Catholics to reflect on Christianity’s past and its future, urging them to repent for their sins and renew their faith.

The pontiff has invited local churches to carry out special events, including synods, to mark the historic date. The Vatican will convene an International Eucharistic Congress in 2000 in a continuing effort to reconcile the splintered Christian churches.

He has expressed a desire to visit the “places on the road taken by the people of God of the Old Covenant,” including Egypt, Israel and Syria.

“Preparing for the year 2000 has become as if it were a hermeneutical (interpretive) key of my pontificate,” John Paul wrote in an apostolic letter on the jubilee.

But preparing for the crush of people who gather at or near the Vatican to mark the beginning of the third Christian millennium may be as challenging as the pope’s quest for Christian unity.

The problem with Rome is perhaps best summed up by a fictional character, Alessandro Giuliani, the protagonist in “A Soldier of the Great War” by Mark Helprin.

“Rome was not meant to move, but to be beautiful,” he said.

“It’s an enormous task of coordination,” said Monsignor Sergio Sebastiani, secretary general of the Vatican Central Jubilee Committee. Sebastiani’s two most challenging problems are housing pilgrims and transporting them.

The church is planning to house up to 200,000 visitors at its convents, colleges and seminaries, mostly outside Rome. It will rely on the central government to make good on its promise of improving train service on lines from Naples in the south to Florence and Venice in the north.

There are about 66,000 hotel beds for rent in Rome and an additional 80,000 within an hour of the city by train or bus. Sebastiani said he expects that many Italians will rent rooms in their homes to visitors, bringing the total accommodation figure to about 1 million.

But fewer hotels than originally envisaged will be constructed outside Rome, Sebastiani said. Why?

Monsignor Liberio Andreatta provided a practical answer: “What would we do with all these buildings after the pilgrims leave? Close them down?”

Andreatta, who runs the Catholic Church’s two main travel agencies charged with transporting pilgrims, said many visitors would stay in small towns up and down the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea, which separates the Italian peninsula from the islands of Corsica, Sardinia and Sicily. Tourists could make day trips to the city by bus or train.

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While new housing may be hard to come by, new churches won’t be. Rome boasts more than 400 churches and an additional 50 churches are expected to be erected outside the city. Many existing houses of worship are awaiting restoration.

Historic structures, such as the Colosseum, are targeted for renovation. Trajan’s Markets, built in the first century, is in the midst of a facelift that is due to be complete in January 1997. The Roman Forum also is receiving some structural reinforcement. In addition, archaeological excavations throughout the city-on the Palatine Hill, in the Roman Forum and in the Baths of Caracalla-are to be stepped up in the coming years.

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But many large-scale modernization and construction projects have not materialized.

“More or less nothing has been done,” said Giuseppe Roma, director of the Censis Foundation, a think tank that monitors public institutions and the economy. “At this point, I think there’s a necessity to concentrate on a few works that could possibly be finished by 1999.”

Roma said the municipal and Italian governments had set an overly ambitious goal of completing 40 projects by 1999-everything from state of the art telecommunications services to expanded roadways. But only a handful of the major infrastructure projects, he said, are likely to be completed by then.

Expansion plans at both Rome airports to accommodate more passengers are likely to be finished. And Roma expects the city will complete a third underground rail line that links the Vatican with a station in the southern part of the city to ease gridlock in the center of Rome.

However, the metro project has not yet begun.

Likewise, other construction expansion plans have not been acted upon. Those include a pedestrian area from St. Peter’s Square to the Tiber River and an expansion of an underground tunnel for vehicles paralleling the river. The work would have to be completed in three years to benefit the millions of people who will descend on Rome in the beginning of 1999.

Andreatta is not optimistic.

“I’m sure that the metro will be done but I’m not sure about the other things,” he said, following a meeting with the pope. The pontiff, he added, “asked about how things are going and reiterated the importance he places on this event. But he doesn’t get into the details of what we do.”

Andreatta blamed Italy’s entrenched bureaucracy for the delays and inefficiency that already plague projects.

Nicola Scalzini, chief of the Italian government’s jubilee projects, agreed, saying tasks are too widely dispersed.

But adapting a city that began to take shape 2,700 years ago to modern needs is “terribly difficult,” Scalzini said. “There’s only so much room to grow.”

Sebastiani is plainly more interested in the spiritual and religious dimensions of the jubilee than moving traffic.

“The year 2000 for us is a great emotional and spiritual occasion,” he said, “an event in which we must reflect on the fact that Jesus Christ was born 2,000 years ago. And we have to ask ourselves, what have we done with his message? What does he mean to us?”

As for the anticipated lack of accommodations and difficulty of maneuvering this already cramped city, he said, “This is above all a spiritual event. It’s not like (pilgrims) are going on holiday.”

MJP END HEILBRONNER