08 July 2021

Praying in Ordinary Time 2021:
40, Santa Maria della Scala, Rome

Santa Maria della Scala in the heart of Trastevere has an unassuming façade (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

During this time in the Church Calendar known as Ordinary Time, I am taking some time each morning to reflect in these ways:

1, photographs of a church or place of worship;

2, the day’s Gospel reading;

3, a prayer from the prayer diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel).

This week my photographs are from seven churches in Rome, and my photographs this morning (8 July 2021) are from Santa Maria della Scala, in the heart of Trastevere.

Santa Maria della Scala in the heart of Trastevere, south of the Porta Settimiana (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

If Trastevere is every tourist’s favourite quarter of Rome, and the Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere is one of the most visited churches there, then Santa Maria della Scala in Trastevere is a very different sort of church. With its unassuming façade, few tourists call in on their way from the Vatican through the Porta Settimiana along the Via della Scala into the heart of Trastevere.

Yet, this church has a richly decorated baroque interior, is a good example of a time of great building activity that lasted from the end of the 16th century through to the early 17th century, has links with Garibaldi’s struggle to unify Italy, and hides a secret story about how Caravaggio shamed the local friars.

Santa Maria della Scala, or Our Lady of the Staircase, shares its name with a better-known church in Siena. This is a titular church, that gives its title a cardinal, yet it was built in 1593-1610 to honour a miraculous icon of the Virgin Mary.

Tradition says that the icon was placed on the landing of a staircase of a neighbouring house, where a mother prayed before it and found that her disabled child was cured. The icon is now on display in the north transept, alongside a baroque statue of Saint John of the Cross.

This church was built on the site of a house once owned by Antonio Stinco from Ancona, who bequeathed it to a Casa Pia founded by Pope Pius IV in 1563 for women wishing to ‘convert to an honest life,’ or repentant prostitutes. Saint Charles Borromeo, who was involved in the project, is commemorated in the dedication of a small oratory that once stood next to the church.

The project was initiated by Pope Clement VIII in 1593, together with Cardinal Tolomeo Gallio, who was the patron of the Casa Pia. They chose Francesco Capriani da Volterra as the architect. But Capriani died the following year having completed only the nave and side chapels.

In 1597, the unfinished church was entrusted by the Pope to the Discalced Carmelites, much of the artwork in the church has Carmelite themes. The friars contracted Matteo da Città di Castello and Ottaviano Nonni Il Mascherino to build their convent next door, which became one of the most important Carmelite houses.

Nonni died in 1606 and so the work was probably finished by Girolamo Rainaldi, who had worked on one of the side chapels in 1604. The cardinal died in 1607, but his nephew Monsignor Marco Gallio agreed to continue funding and the church was finally completed in 1610.

The Carmelite friars continued the decorative work throughout the first half of the 17th century. In 1650, almost 50 years after the church was completed, Carlo Rainaldi designed the tempietto-shaped baldachino with 16 slender jasper Corinthian columns and a high altar.

In 1664 the church was made titular, and Paolo Savelli became the first cardinal deacon. The church was restored in the 1730s, and much of the decoration dates from then.

The last two cardinals linked with the church were François-Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan from Vietnam, who died in 2002, and Cardinal Stanislaw Kazimierz Nagy, who died in 2013.

Cardinal Ernest Simoni Troshani became the cardinal five years ago when he was named by Pope Francis on 19 November 2016. He is a Franciscan-educated priest who was never consecrated a bishop. He spent 28 years in prison camps in Albania, and was sentenced to death on two occasions.

The façade of the church is restrained but it is large and in some ways it dominates the little piazza in front. This two-storey façade is higher than the nave behind it. The central portion of the first storey is brought forward slightly, and has two pairs of gigantic Corinthian pilasters flanking the doorway and supporting the blank entablature. Another pair of pilasters stand at the outer corners.

The entrance has a pair of swagged Ionic columns, and over the door is a baroque statue of the Madonna and Child in an ornate arched niche with a ribbed conch, volutes and a crowning triangular pediment intruded into by the conch. The sculptor was Francesco di Cusart, who carved it in 1633.

The second storey has two pairs of pilasters of the same style as those of the storey below, except the capitals are composite and not Corinthian. They flank a large rectangular window with a balustrade and Ionic columns, and this has a raised segmental pediment. The crowning triangular pediment contains a simple coat of arms, and this storey is flanked by a pair of gigantic volutes.

The plan of the church is based on a Latin cross, with short transepts that do not extend beyond the walls of the nave aisles. The central dome has a shallow pitched and tiled saucer on an octagonal drum without windows. This has a tall lantern, with its own smaller octagonal cap.

Inside the church, there are three chapels on each side of the single, three-bay nave, and a transept with a domed crossing, with an altar in each end of the transept. The sanctuary has a single bay, and is continued by a choir with an apse behind the high altar, which has a free-standing, domes baldacchino. This baldacchino has 16 slender Corinthian columns of Sicilian alabaster. The statues of the four Evangelists look like bronze, but are terracotta – the originals were looted in 1849.

The surfaces of the interior walls and ceilings are richly decorated. The vaults of the nave, dome, choir and left arm of the transept are decorated with painting intended to resemble mouldings. The right transept ceiling has fine example of stucco relief.

The floor has several interesting tomb slabs, and the one commemorating Julio Caesari Castellano (1662) shows a winged skeleton.

The apse of the choir has a painting of the Virgin Mary as Queen of Heaven, flanked by paintings of the Baptism of Christ, the Marriage at Cana, the Last Supper and the Ascension by Lucas de la Haye (Fra Luca Fiammingo), a Carmelite friar. The apse conch has a fresco of Christ with his mother and Saint Joseph, and Carmelite saints.

The side chapels are dedicated to Saint John the Baptist, Saint Hyacinth, Our Lady, Saint Joseph and Saint Anne, Saint Teresa of Jesus, Our Lady of the Staircase, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, the Assumption, the Crucifix or Saint John of the Cross.

Some of these side chapels are also the funerary chapels of Roman families, including the Sinibaldi, Dionisi, Barisiani, Sorbolongo and Santacroce families.

The church stands next to a Carmelite monastery that served in the 17th century as the pharmacy of the Papal Court.

In 1849, during the last stages of the Roman Republic’s resistance to the invading French forces, Santa Maria della Scala was used as a field hospital to care for Garibaldi’s soldiers who had been wounded in fighting in Trastevere. Most of the fighting took place near Trastevere, which explains why the Garibaldi monument overlooks the church from the Janiculum.

The convent was sequestered by the Italian government in 1873 and turned into a police station. But the Carmelites continue to administer Santa Maria della Scala.

Saint Teresa of Jesus was a Carmelite reformer whose work led to the formation of the Discalced Carmelites as a separate order. In her side chapel, the altarpiece is ‘The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa’ by Francesco Mancini (1745). The saint’s right foot is preserved in this chapel as a relic.

The other paintings in the church include ‘The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist’ by the Dutch painter Gerrit van Honthorst and ‘The Death of the Virgin’ by Carlo Saraceni, and ‘The Marriage of Our Lady’ by Antonio David. Saraceni’s painting replaces a more controversial original work by Caravaggio.

According to some legends, Caravaggio used the body of a prostitute who had drowned in the Tiber as the model for the dead Virgin Mary. An alternative version says the model was one of the artist’s mistresses. In addition, there are still debates about what happened to the Virgin Mary’s body after her death, and the Discalced Carmelites at Santa Maria suspected Caravaggio’s treatment of the topic not only lacked decorum but was close to what they regarded as heresy. Caravaggio’s original work made its way to the Louvre.

However, Caravaggio’s altarpiece of ‘The Entombment of Christ’ survives in the Chiesa Nuova or the Church of Santa Maria in Vallicella.

Santa Maria della Scala has a richly decorated baroque interior (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Matthew 10: 7-15 (NRSVA):

[Jesus said to them:] 7 ‘As you go, proclaim the good news, “The kingdom of heaven has come near.” 8 Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment. 9 Take no gold, or silver, or copper in your belts, 10 no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals, or a staff; for labourers deserve their food. 11 Whatever town or village you enter, find out who in it is worthy, and stay there until you leave. 12 As you enter the house, greet it. 13 If the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it; but if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you. 14 If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town. 15 Truly I tell you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgement than for that town.’

The unfinished church was entrusted to the Discalced Carmelites In 1597, and the church has many Carmelite themes (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Prayer in the USPG Prayer Diary:

The Prayer in the USPG Prayer Diary today (8 July 2021) invites us to pray:

We pray for an end to conflict. May we act as peacemakers in our daily lives and campaign for an end to war and violence.

Yesterday’s reflection

Continued tomorrow

‘The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa’ by Francesco Mancini (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org

‘The Marriage of Our Lady’ by Antonio David (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Kenilworth Square house
for sale was the Irish home
of a Holocaust refugee

No 65 Kenilworth Square … home of Ludwig Hopf, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, in 1939, is now on the market (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2021)

Patrick Comerford

No 65 Kenilworth Square South in Rathgar, Dublin 6, is currently on the market through Sherry FitzGerald with an asking price of €1,350,000. It is described by the selling agents as a ‘handsome, distinctive, Victorian home.’ But it is also interesting because of its associations with Professor Ludwig Hopf, a Holocaust refugee, theoretical physicist, and friend of Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger and Carl Jung.

No 65 Kenilworth Square is a three-storey bay-windowed Victorian home with four double bedrooms, on the corner of Kenilworth Square at the junction of Leicester Avenue.

From July to December 1939, this was the home of Professor Ludwig Hopf (1884-1939), a German-Jewish refugee and theoretical physicist who had been the first assistant to Albert Einstein and introduced Einstein to the psychoanalyst Carl Jung.

Walking around Kenilworth Square in Dublin in recent days, and working on photo-essay earlier this year on the architecture, families and history of the square, I was surprised to come across the story of the Ludwig Hopf.

Ludwig Hopf was a German Jewish refugee who escaped the Holocaust when he fled to Dublin in the weeks immediately before the outbreak of World War II and lived and died on Kenilworth Square.

Hopf was a theoretical physicist who made contributions to mathematics, special relativity, hydrodynamics, and aerodynamics. He was born in Nürnberg on 23 October 1884, the son of Elise (née Josephthal) and Hans Hopf.

The Hopf family were prominent hop merchants and an established Jewish family in Nürnberg. His great-grandfather, Löb Hopf, moved to Nürnberg from Upper Franconia in 1852, and there he was among the first Jews to acquire citizenship. His son, Stephan Hopf (1826-1893), Ludwig’s grandfather, held high public office and became ‘respectably wealthy’ as a hop wholesaler.

His father, Hans Hopf (1854-1918), was a prominent industrialist and business figure in Nürnberg and a city councillor. He inherited the family business interests and was a co-founder of the city’s public library and reading rooms in 1898. His large, private collection of Nürnberg memorabilia included many priceless items. During World War I, he was in charge of the city’s supply of food and potatoes.

Ludwig Hopf’s mother Elise (1865-1936) was the daughter of Gustav Josephthal who presided over both the Nürnberg lawyers and Nürnberg’s liberal Jewish community, the latter for four decades from 1869-1909. This family had lived in Franconia for generations.

Elise has been described as ‘without a doubt one of the most forceful personalities in the family and, indeed, among Bavarian Jewry of her time.’ She was a member of many committees and councils, a leading member of the women’s suffrage movement, instrumental in the development of welfare services in Nuremberg, particularly for single mothers, and was prominent in Jewish public life. She was a prolific letter writer and kept a diary until late in life.

She was remembered in 2016 with an exhibition at the Nuremberg State Archives on Elise Hopf and the bourgeois women movement in Nuremberg. Elise and Hans Hopf were buried together in the old Jewish cemetery in Nürnberg.

Ludwig Hopf was born in Nuremberg on 23 October 1884, the eldest son in the family. His two siblings, Ernst and Betty, remained connected with the hop business. However, Ludwig followed his scientific interests, although initially he was attracted by philosophy and music. He studied in Berlin and Paris before going to Munich in 1906 where Arnold Sommerfeld had begun to build one of the most important nurseries for theoretical physics. He received his PhD in Munich in 1909 on the topic of hydrodynamics.

Arnold Sommerfeld, Max Planck, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr are regarded as the founding fathers of modern theoretical physics.

Hopf became Einstein’s first assistant at the University of Zurich. There Hopf introduced Einstein to Carl Jung, and Einstein returned to Jung’s house several times over the years. Hopf also visited the Karl-Ferdinand University in Prague with Einstein.

Ludwig Hopf married Alice Goldschmidt in 1912. She had a similar, privileged middle-class background. Her father, Ferdinand Goldschmidt, was a physician in Nuremberg, and was also the author of a number of publications in the health sector. The relationship between son-in-law and parents-in-law was so good that they eventually moved in next door in Aachen.

Ludwig and Alice were the parents of four sons and a daughter: Hans (1913), Peter (1915), Arnold (1916), Dietrich (1918), and Liselore (1925).

Hopf was on the staff of the Hochschule from 1914 and had become one of its most popular teachers. During World War I, he contributed to the design of military aircraft. He became a professor in hydrodynamics and aerodynamics at the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen (RWTH Aachen University), a leading technical university in Germany, in the 1920s, and eventually became a professor.

Hopf was dismissed from his position as Professor of Applied Mathematics in Aachen on racist, anti-Semitic grounds soon after the Nazis seized power. The situation became even more perilous after Kristallnacht on the night of 9/10 November 1938. The SS efforts to arrest him and were thwarted by his son Arnold posing as his father.

Arnold Kopf, who had pretended to be his father, was arrested and was taken to Buchenwald. He was one of the 13,687 Jews imprisoned in Buchenwald between April and December 1938; of these, 10,012 were released by the end of 1938. Arnold was released in December 1938 when he obtained papers and he fled to Kenya.

Ludwig Kopf remained in Germany until 1939 and escaped the Nazi regime only at the last minute. In early February 1939, through the efforts of Sydney Goldstein in Cambridge and Peter Paul Ewald in Belfast, a research grant in Cambridge materialised. Ludwig and Alice Hopf left Germany for England with Liselore in late March 1939. Three weeks later, they moved into 86 Lovell Road in north-east Cambridge.

The relationship between Ludwig and his parents-in-law was so good that they later followed the couple to England and then to Ireland.

Ludwig Hopf moved to Dublin on 17 July 1939 (Photograph: Deutsches Museum, München / Sommerfeld Sammlung)

The Hopf family moved to Dublin on 17 July 1939 when Ludwig was offered a specially created professorship of mathematics at Trinity College Dublin. They moved to No 65 Kenilworth Square in Rathgar, close to the corner with Leicester Avenue.

He was soon in contact with other exiled academics, and guests at his home on Kenilworth Square included: the serologist Hans Sachs (1877-1945), who had first fled to Oxford and then lived at 3 Palmerston Villas, Dublin; Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961), who was to take up a position in the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies; a young Hans Reiss (1922-2020), who later completed his PhD at TCD and became Professor of German in Bristol; and John Hennig (1911-1986), a radical pacifist church historian and theologian who was then teaching at Belvedere College and whose wife Clare (Kläre) Meyer (1904-1990) was the daughter of the Jewish inventor and entrepreneur Felix Meyer (1875-1950) of Aachen.

Hopf regarded Dublin as expensive to live in and estimated that everything cost 50% more than in Cambridge. Writing to friends in Germany, he describes living in ‘a very beautiful, very famous and very expensive corner of Europe.’

However, shortly after taking up his post at TCD, Hopf became seriously ill with a previously undiagnosed thyroid failure. He died at 65 Kenilworth Square on the evening of 21 December 1939.

The speakers at his funeral were two fellow refugee Hans Sachs in German and Erwin Schrödinger in English. Schrödinger, who was then living in Clontarf, described Hopf as ‘a friend of the greatest geniuses of his time, indeed, he was one of them.’

He recalled how Hopf ‘soon began to love this country which had received him with such kindness, and to love a people whose mentality he felt to be akin to his own. He would have continued to call himself a happy man, had it pleased Providence not to take him away from us. His loss is irretrievable to all of us, and more so to his next of kin. In bidding him his last farewell, we are determined to preserve his memory and to remember his friendship with gratitude.’

After the death of their 18-year-old daughter Liselore (known in the family as Mädi) in Cork Street Hospital, Dublin, on 28 September 1942, his widow Alice returned to England with their sons. She died in London in 1975.

Through the persistence of Father Willie Walshe, a former missionary in Kenya who knew Arnold Hopf, his sister Kay McNamara and John Halligan, the grave of Ludwig Hopf in Mount Jerome was repaired in 2013.

At a small gathering described by Frank McNally in The Irish Times, the prayers at Hopf’s grave were said in English by Willie Walshe and in Hebrew by Tomi Reichental, a survivor of Bergen-Belsen.

The gathering at Ludwig Hopf’s grave in Mount Jerome in 2013 (Photograph: Frank McNally)

Two doors away, No 67 Kenilworth Square was the home of Dr Ernst Scheyer (1890-1958), a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. He was born in Oppeln in Upper Silesia in 1890, was decorated for his bravery in the Germany army in World War I, and later earned a PhD in Breslau (Wroclaw). Later, he was a practising lawyer and a respected member of the Jewish community in Liegnitz, Silesia. He married Marie Margareta (Mieze) Epstein, who was five years younger than him and was born in Breslau.

He was rounded up after Krtistallnacht, and spent almost a month in Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp near Berlin. He arrived in Dublin on 14 January 1939, and the Scheyer family made their home at 67 Kenilworth Square. He later taught German at Saint Columba’s College, Rathfarnham, and in Trinity College Dublin. When he died in 1958, he was buried in the Progressive Jewish community’s cemetery in Woodtown, Rathfarnham.

Nearby, No 60 Kenilworth Square was the home of Charles William Comerford (1877-1953), the only member of the Comerford family who was actually in the GPO in Dublin in Easter Week 1916.

Charles William Comerford was born on 28 February 1877, and was baptised on 31 January 1878, Saint Peter’s Church (Church of Ireland), Aungier Street, Dublin. On 9 June 1910, in Holy Trinity Church, Rathmines, he married Adelaide Margaret Field (1878-1953) of 13 Leinster Square, Rathmines, daughter of John E Field, solicitor’s clerk, of 39 Longwood Avenue, South Circular Road, Dublin, and his wife Elizabeth Mary (née Doyle), of 53 Lower Clanbrassil Street.

His granddaughter, Angela Marks, believes Charles Comerford was in the GPO in O’Connell Street in 1916 and says family tradition tells of him crawling out along the street and swearing to leave Ireland.

The Comerford family left Ireland ca 1922, but the memory of the family home on Kenilworth Square continued in the name ‘Kenilworth’ which they gave to his house on Nore Road in Portishead, near Bristol. Adelaide Comerford died on 2 February 1953, and Charles Comerford died seven months later on 3 September 1953. Charles and Elizabeth Comerford had three daughters, Lillian, Nora and Kathleen, who were born while they were living at No 60. All three daughters became teachers in England.

After the Comerford family moved, No 60 Kenilworth Square was home to the same family for almost a century until it was placed on the market in 2016.

No 60 Kenilworth Square … the home of Charles William Comerford in 1916 … the only member of the Comerford family who was actually in the GPO in Easter Week 1916 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2021)