Santa Susanna

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Baroque façade of Santa Susanna, by Carlo Maderno (1603).

Santa Susanna is a church on the Quirinal in Rome, with a titulus at its site that dates back to about 280. The modern church, rebuilt in 1585–1603, is the seat of the American Catholic Church in Rome. Since 1958, the Archbishop of Boston has held the post of Cardinal Priest of Santa Susanna. However Bernard Francis Law, who resigned his post as archbishop in 2002, has retained this position.

About 280, an early Christian house of worship was established on this site, which, like many of the earliest Christian meeting places, was in a house (domus ecclesiae). The domus belonged, according to the sixth-century acta, to brothers named Caius and Gabinus, prominent Christians. Caius is identified as the same Caius who was acclaimed Bishop of Rome and who is commemorated as Pope Caius, with the dates 283–296. According to the acta, his brother Gabinus had a daughter, Susanna. Her earliest documented attestations identify her as the patron of the church, not as a martyr^[1] and previously the church was identified in the earliest, fourth-century documents by its titulus "of Gaius" by the Baths of Diocletian or as "ad duas domos" ("near the two houses") It is mentioned in connection with a Roman synod of 499.

Traditionally, the structure officially became a church around 330, under Constantine I, when the basilicas of numerous house churches came to be adapted for liturgical use. The basilica was T-shaped with a central nave with twelve columns on each side, flanked by side aisles. All that are left of these two side aisles, after the late sixteenth-century rebuilding, are the two side chapels of the basilica church.

From the synod of 599, the church appears under the titulus of Susanna; the veneration of Susanna has been localized on this site without a break ever since. In the contemporary acta, Susanna is martyred with her family when the girl refuses to marry the son of emperor Diocletian; the occasion of Susanna's martyrdom is a literary trope that is familiar in other passions of virgins in the Roman martyrology ^[2]

Pope Sergius I restored it at the end of the 7th century, but Pope Leo III, the fourth pope who had been pastor of this church, rebuilt it from the ground in 796, adding the great apse and conserving the relics of the saints in the crypt. A vast mosaic of Christ flanked by Leo and the Emperor Charlemagne and Saints Susanna and Felicity on the other was so badly damaged in the twelfth century by an earthquake, that the interior was plastered over in the complete renovation that spanned the years 1585–1602 and frescoed by Caesare Nebbia (1536–1614).

A façade remained to be constructed. The present church of Santa Susanna on its ancient foundations was the first independent commission in Rome for Carlo Maderno, who had trained as an assistant to his uncle Domenico Fontana, the chief architect of Pope Sixtus V. In 1603, Maderno completed the façade, a highly influential early Baroque design. The dynamic rhythm of columns and pilasters, crowding centrally, and the protrusion and increased central decoration add further complexity to the structure. Notice the interplay of relationships, none exactly symmetric on any one mirror side. The entrance and roof are surrounded by triangular pediments. The windows replaced by niches. There is an incipient playfullness with the rules of classic design, still maintaining rigor.

Santa Susanna was accounted so successful that in 1605 Pope Paul V named Maderno architect of Saint Peter’s Basilica, where he completed the nave and constructed the great facade.

Among the previous Cardinal Priests is Pope Nicholas V (1446).

Entombed in the church are five early church martyrs and Saints: Susanna, her father Gabinus, Felicity of Rome, Pope Eleuterus, and Genesius of Rome.