c. 2000 Religion News Service

ROME _ Chroniclers of the day reported that the Jubilee of 1300, the first Holy Year of the Christian era, was so successful the Vatican literally raked in the cash.

Some 200,000 pilgrims flocked to Rome from throughout Europe to pray at the altars of the basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul-without-the-Walls and secure indulgences to remit temporal punishment for their sins.

“And multitudes of people thronged there from all Christianity so that it would appear incredible to those who have not seen it,” one witness said. Romans were required to spend 30 days on Holy Year observances, pilgrims from afar 15 days.

“Two priests holding rakes were stationed night and day at the altar of St. Paul’s collecting an endless flow of money,” another contemporary account said. Presumably, a pair of priests also was on duty at St. Peter’s Basilica.

A sampling of those coins _ from Brittany, Bavaria, Sweden, Slavonia, Vienna, Anjou, Arnheim, Athens and elsewhere _ is currently on view at an exhibition on the pope who proclaimed Christendom’s first recorded Holy Year and the historic and artistic context in which it unfolded.

According to the curators of the show, “Boniface VIII and His Time,” at Rome’s Palazzo Venezia until July 16, the money-raking operation was not entirely venal. The pilgrims left coins at the altars to symbolize the completion of their journey and release from their vow, and the church used some of the offerings to aid the poor. The rest, however, bought real estate.

Although Boniface was the first to give Holy Year a Christian connotation, the idea of a Jubilee was well established. The Old Testament Book of Leviticus speaks of a sabbatical year to be held after seven times seven years when, under Jewish law, families were to be reunited, ancestral land returned to its owners, slaves freed, debt forgiven and the land left uncultivated.

“And you shall hallow the 50th year and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: you shall return, every one of you to your property and every one of you to your family,” Leviticus says. “That 50th year shall be a jubilee for you: you shall not sow or reap the aftergrowth or harvest the unpruned vines.”

Boniface, however, had other goals in mind. For him, the Jubilee of the year 1300 was a means to confront the considerable spiritual and political tensions of his day and to confirm the central role of Rome and of the papacy in the Christian world.

The pope, who reigned from Dec. 24, 1294 to Oct. 11, 1303, was the immediate successor of Celestine V, an ascetic hermit, healer and monastic leader, who became the only Roman Catholic in history to voluntarily abdicate.

Celestine had hoped to return to the life of a hermit, but Boniface locked him up, fearing his powerful enemies might use the “angel pope,” as Celestine was known during his reign of less than a year, as the rallying point for a schism.

Boniface, the new pope, a diplomat and authority on canon law, was deeply _ but not always successfully _ involved in power struggles over Sicily, Scotland, Hungary, Denmark, England, France and Austria. At home, he warred with the cardinals of the Colonna family and formed an alliance with the Orsinis.

Only six years after his death, the 70 years of the “Babylonian captivity” of the papacy at Avignon began.

During his not quite nine years as pontiff, Boniface devoted himself to affirming papal authority and bolstering his own role as the holder of that authority.

Redesigning the papal tiara, he added to the single diadem at the base, which symbolized priestly authority, two more crowns representing royal and imperial power. A marble bust loaned to the show by the Apostolic Palace shows a smug-looking Boniface wearing a tall conical crown and holding the keys of Peter.

Boniface placed other statues of himself over basilica entrances and city gates in Rome, Orvieto and Anagni, his birthplace. He became the first pope to have his image engraved on coins and the first to commission his own tomb.

Designed by Tuscan sculptor and architect Arnolfo di Cambio, the foremost artist of his day, the tomb not only contained a statue of Boniface lying on his funeral bed in his papal paraments and tiara but also mosaics by Jacopo Torriti showing Boniface being received by Sts. Peter and Paul, the Virgin Mary and the Christ child.

The tomb, erected inside the entrance to St. Peter’s Basilica, was broken up and removed during construction work at the start of the 17th century, and Boniface’s sarcophagus joined those of other popes in the grotto below the main altar.

But the fragments of Torriti’s precious mosaics depicting the Madonna and child appear in the exhibition, shown together for the first time in 400 years. The Madonna is now in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the child in the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York City.

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Proclaiming the Jubilee in the bull “Antiquorum habet fide relatio” on Feb. 22, 1300, Boniface established the tradition of linking indulgences to Holy Year pilgrimages that has survived more than 400 years of attack by Protestants.

“A narration of the antiquities worthy of belief reports that to those who went to the honorable basilica of the Prince of the Apostles in the city were granted remissions and indulgences of sins,” he wrote at the start of the papal bull.

In his own papal bull of indiction, “Incarnationis Mysterium,” which he issued Nov. 29, 1998, Pope John Paul II called the granting of indulgences one of the “constitutive elements” of the Jubilee. He also called for the application of the Old Testament Jubilee custom of debt forgiveness to Third World debt.

DEA END POLK