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Note: Hilary White is the Rome correspondent for LifeSiteNews.com.

SANTA MARINELLA, December 24, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Well, that was quite a year, wasn’t it! It seems that nearly all my attention has been directed at the papacy since that unforgetable moment when I woke to a phone call from a friend who said what I think might have been the strangest sentence I’ve ever heard: “Pope Benedict has resigned.”

When the first wave of shock wore off, I’m sorry to say that my first thought was not for the Church or for the world, and not even a prayer, which it certainly should have been, but rather: “Good grief! What on earth am I going to write about this?”

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Since that moment, and since the equally astonishing evening of March 12th, I’ve been rather of two minds about the whole business. People ask me regularly what it’s like working as a giornalista in Rome, and it’s difficult to sum it up. It’s great. It’s awful. It’s terrifying. It’s amazing.

Being the Rome correspondent through this historic period is probably going to be one of the most important times of my life. I’ve made professional and personal connections with some people I couldn’t possibly have imagined knowing ten years ago when I started all this. I’ve hob-nobbed with royalty, with cardinals, with Vaticanisti, with billionaires, with the famous and the notorious. I’ve become familiar with some of the ins and outs of Vatican politics and know the principal names and positions of the lead players in the political game that has gone on here for over 2000 years. I’ve had people contact me from all over what we used to call Christendom asking for help, for contacts, for coverage of their pro-life initiatives (the latest from Romania, Macedonia and Croatia).

I’ve gained a perspective on the news and events that I could not possibly have had from any other position. Ah, and there’s the rub. It’s this perspective that constitutes the “on the other hand. In this kind of work, there are certainly days when we wish we didn’t know what we know, and certainly times when I wish we were not the ones with the task of recording it all, of digging under the MSM’s headlines to find out what they’re leaving out. There are plenty of days when I look at my Mac, sitting innocently on the dining table, and think, “Couldn’t we just give it all a pass today?” 

An email from an old friend summed up my feelings pretty well, “Don’t you sometimes wish you wrote for Tulip Fancier’s Weekly?”

This is my sixth Christmas here and the responsibility of getting the story right… Well, when you’re a Catholic and the story is nearly always about the pope and nearly all the world is getting the story wrong, you can imagine how it could weigh a bit. So, there’s a little pressure. You get lonely away from family; you get homesick for cultural landmarks you recognise; you forget sometimes that the Great War has, despite appearances, already been won and can get overwhelmed by the ever-increasing awfulness of the headlines. 

Frankly, there are days when you just want to ditch it all, and go write for Tulip Fancier’s Weekly. 

So much is happening, in the Vatican, at the EU, in Italian national politics, in British and Irish politics, and throughout Europe that sometimes perhaps we can get too caught up in it all and get distracted by the news and forget about the bigger picture. Now and then, I have to drag my head out of the Little Square Palantir and look around, and I’m still astonished to be here. “Good heavens Cat,” I say regularly, “We’re in Italy!” 

When I came here, I had been very reluctant to leave my little English country village, and the long-lost family I’d found there after so many years apart. My mother’s brother and his wife, my Uncle Mike and Auntie Gill, had not seen me since I was six when they came to get me at the Manchester airport where I landed after shaking the Canadian dust off. 

I had, frankly, run away from home when my mother passed away from cancer in 2007, having felt an overpowering urge to go back to England and find out who I was and where I came from. And there they were, the people with whom I had an unbreakable, ontological connection; a family. I had not seen them since I was a small child, but knew them instantly, and they knew me. After a year of living there, and basking, for the first time in nearly 30 years, in the warmth of family life, I knew in more than a merely theoretical way what we were fighting for.

And then I had to leave. But it is still England in the country, not Italy in the city, that remains my natural habitat. As I write this, I’m listening to a CD of English medieval and Baroque Christmas music and feeling the ache, and looking eagerly forward to my first visit over there in three years. (Auntie Gill’s roast potatoes!) 

As many of you know, I don’t actually live in Rome. As a national capital and as…well… Rome, it’s really just too expensive, for one thing, and for another it would just be too much like being at work all the time. After eleven years in Vancouver and five more in Toronto, this small-town girl has had enough. Enough traffic, noise, crowded sidewalks, smog and Big Cityness. So, along with a little colony of ex-pats, I live in a beautiful little town, Santa Marinella, about 60 miles up the coast on the commuter trainline, one town down from Rome’s port, Civitavecchia. 

In the summer, Santa Mar is full of Roman tourists who come out to enjoy the beachyness of it all, with the sand entirely covered with umbrellas and the population more than tripling for the season. But in winter, it’s a different place, quiet and full of older people and recently married couples with kids who also can’t afford to live in the big city. The shopkeepers are kindly and the postman gets to know you; the local pharmacists always know your prescriptions; the locals are relaxed and friendly, even by Italian standards. And the rents are cheap. 

This morning I woke up and immediately all the things to do pressed on my mind. Pack a bag for my holiday in Britain, get all the laundry done, get in a supply of food for the cat, dust and vacuum, and write this column. And everything had to be done before nine pm in time for the last train into town. Tonight is the midnight Mass at our parish, Santissima Trinita dei Pellegrini, and the ex-pat gang are meeting for a little Christmas cheer beforehand. We’ll all be crashing over at a friend’s place near the Colosseum and will be spending the day together tomorrow. 

But as I stood in the bay window and saw the sun shining with all its might, and the breeze carrying the white clouds across the sky, the sea shimmering blue, I thought, “T’heck with all that”. It was 14 degrees here today (sorry Canadians) and the thought of Christmas Eve housework was insupportable. How could I even think of wasting the brief daylight hours?

In Santa Mar a twenty minute walk – up a 30 degree incline – into the Etruscan hills will bring you above the town and looking out over the headlands east as far as Santa Severa – with its fortified castle, built by the popes to fend off Saracen pirates in the 13th century – and west as far as Civitavecchia’s port. In the hills are wildflowers, oak and olive groves, farms with sheep and goats and friendly donkeys and shaggy horses who love to see a visitor with a carrot.

And, of course, the wine-dark sea is there, a symbol in this ancient place, reminding us of eternity, the relative unimportance of our current little collection of passing woes and troubles. This area was settled a long time ago, with remains found dating to the neolithic, and in the times before the Romans, Santa Mar was the port of the ancient and mysterious Estruscan kingdom. Our town’s little castle was built in the eleventh century on top of the ruins of a Roman Senator’s holiday villa. 

And in this continuity is a consolation. The ancient towns, the Roman ruins, the sea and the liturgical calendar tell us the same thing: Christmas will give way to Epiphany; winter will pass and then we’ll have Lent then it will be spring; the flowers will be back and the bells will ring the astonished joy of Easter.

Christmas has come again, and we are all still here, the Real is still the Real and we still know which side to choose, Deo gratias! 

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