San Giovanni Crisostomo is a mid 20th century parish and titular church at Via Emilio de Marchi 6, which is in a locality called Talenti north of the Via Nomentana in the Monte Sacro Alto quarter. Pictures of the church on Wikimedia Commons are here.
The dedication is to St John Chrysostom.
History[]
The parish was established in 1964, and a new church designed by the partnership of Ennio Canino and Viviano Rizzi. Completion was in 1969.
It was mande titular very soon after it was consecrated in 1969, and given the cardinalate title of San Giovanni Crisostomo a Monte Sacro Alto.
The penultimate titular was José de Jesús Horacio Pimiento Rodríguez, who was appointed in 2015 after the previous incumbent, Bernard Agrè, had died in the previous year. He himself died in 2019, and was replaced by Jean-Claude Hollerich.
Exterior[]
This church was designed in a rather stark Modernist style, verging on the Brutalist. It has a T-shaped plan, created by adding two little square chapels either side of the entrance end of the rectangular main building. The outer side walls are mostly occupied by ancillary buildings, and the concrete roof is almost flat but has a very slight transverse curve.
Above the altar is a large flat-roofed rectangular lantern, the source of most of the natural light in the church, the far wall of which is a continuation of the main altar wall upwards. This lantern is supported by two square concrete pillars in the interior, either side of the altar. The altar wall is of pink brick, decorated with alternate vertical bands of raised and recessed brickwork of equal width.
The entrance façade, which stretches across the length of the crossbar of the T, looks rather like a railway station. It has an enormous flat-roofed concrete canopy, supported by one concrete pillar in the form of a telescope with a truncated cone capital. The underside at the outer edges is curved, and the concrete of this and the pillar show shuttering marks. The windowless screen walls on either side, of travertine ashlar blocks, are decorated by fourteen thin vertical pilasters each that do not reach top or ground. Along the top edge of both is a dark grey concrete strip. Under the canopy, the walls are continued to either side of the entrance, although cut down to two-thirds of the height, and each of these shorter walls has three pilasters. Above the screen wall, both either side and under the canopy, are stained glass windows. The roof has deep eaves under its curve.
The altar wall is decorated with pilasters in the same design, and has a strip of stained glass window under the roofline which is continued into the lantern along its outer edges.
Interior[]
The interior walls are of the same design as the external ones, that behind the altar being brick and the side ones being concrete as is the roof.
The stained glass gives most of the colour, although there is a large icon of the patron saint on the left hand lantern pillar and one of the Baptism of Christ on the right hand one. Both of these are in a traditional Byzantine style.
The glass is of good quality, figurative and depicting events in salvation history.
The left hand entrance chapel is dedicated to the Blessed Sacrament, and the right hand one is the so-called Chapel of the Confession which contains a wooden statue of the Madonna and Child.
Access[]
The church is open:
7:30 to 13:00, and 16:30 to 20:00.
Liturgy[]
Mass is celebrated (May 2018, according to the Diocese):
Weekdays 8:30 (not July, August), 18:30 (19:00 in summer);
Sundays and Solemnities 8:30, 10:30, 12:)0 (not summer), 18:30 (19:00 summer).
"Summer" here is from the second week of June to that of September.
There is Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament on the first Thursday of the month, 19:00 to 20:15.
The Solemnity of St John Chrysostom is on 13 September.
External links[]
Parish website ("under construction", May 2018)