Battle of Santa Susanna : Religion: A mini-schism developed over control of a historic church in Rome. At root were differences in cultures and world views between two orders.

In the name of God, American missionary priests and reclusive Italian nuns have fought one another for six years to win control of one of Rome’s oldest churches. Anonymous phone calls and baroque bureaucratic manipulation became the battleground of a war that escalated at its most fevered into an ecclesiastical street brawl.

Now, the bitter and embarrassing struggle between religious orders seems almost over.

The Americans think they have won.

The nuns and the priests are diametrically opposed in their view of the world. Yet each is faithful to his or her own special calling. Their prolonged squabble in the shadow of the Vatican underlines a dilemma of diversity that stalks a Catholic church whose 850 million members pray alike but sometimes journey--in anger--in awkwardly opposite directions pursuing the same goals.

The war for the historic Santa Susanna church became a clash of centuries, pitting inward-looking nuns, chary of the outside world, against outward-reaching priests, who embrace it. It became a fight for survival.

The trouble began at Santa Susanna one day in 1985 when Roman fire marshals turned up out of the blue and declared the church unsafe. Their action dismayed the American pastors of the church, which has more than 3,500 American parishioners, but delighted the small community of cloistered Cistercian nuns in an adjoining monastery.

And who had summoned the inspectors to examine a long-sagging roof?

The sisters, whom American and other disgruntled parishioners came to regard as nuns with bad habits, usually don’t talk with strangers. But the Rome newspaper La Repubblica neatly summarized their views: “Yankees, Go Home.”

Santa Susanna has been closed ever since, as repeated salvos of nun-fired red tape have nonplussed and dispossessed the Paulist priests who had administered the church as the parish of Rome’s American community.

It finally took a stern Vatican directive last month to get the church keys back in the hands of an American pastor, the Rev. John Foley.

But the legal maneuvering continues, and Santa Susanna, despite recent restoration of its baroque facade, is a mess inside: It will cost more than $1 million to put it back in shape.

For the white-cowled Italian nuns, most of whom come from a handful of villages in the Abruzzo mountains east of Rome, the Americans are newcomers who represent a noisy, distracting and ultimately destructive nuisance to their monastery’s way of life; it was anachronistic perhaps, but proudly prized.

The Paulists, a missionary order founded last century in the New York suburb of Scarsdale to convert Americans in ways appropriate to American life, came to Santa Susanna in 1922.

The Cistercian nuns, daughters of an order founded in 12th Century France, have been here, wrapped silently in their Roman monastery near the Via Veneto, since 1557. They work with their hands. They live poor, in complete seclusion, contemplative ascetics.

At its peak, the Roman monastery sheltered up to 150 nuns. Today there are only about 15 nuns left. The Cistercian order, like most others in the Roman Catholic church, weeps for a paucity of new members.

“A positive interpretation is that the problem was born of the vocation crisis in the monastery, and a belief among the nuns that it was connected with the existence of the American community. They feel we make their presence obscure--that nobody knows they’re back there,” said Rev. Ronald Roberson, one of three Paulists in Rome. “They think if they make the Americans go away, they’d have more public exposure and more vocations. We sympathize but don’t think our departure would be a solution.”

A less positive interpretation favored by many Santa Susanna parishioners is that the troubles were stoked by a new abbess and an Italian Cistercian priest, Domenico Paccherini. After more than half a century of apparently peaceful coexistence, the Paulists began to feel sisterly ire soon after he became the monastery’s chaplain.

Paccherini’s presence bulked large in 1989, when he blocked Foley’s access to his office at Santa Susanna while Pope John Paul II was arriving for a visit. A policeman separated the priests in time to greet their Pope.

The Paulists’ sacristy, as well as an upstairs 10,000-volume English-language library widely used by the city’s American community--both Catholic and non-Catholic--survived the closing of the church. But Foley says the Cistercian abbess complained continually about their use.

One day in 1989, the Paulists found the locks changed on the doors to the church office, sacristy and library; the furniture was outside. The office roof was later removed. Mail addressed to the Americans began being returned marked “Addressee Unknown.”

All the while, roof repairs by the Italian fine arts ministry--the church is a national landmark--advanced at a snail’s pace that pleased the nuns but not the Paulists. The Paulists temporarily borrowed another church but complain that pastoral contact with their flock dropped to about half of its pre-spat level.

Then the electrical inspectors came.

Santa Susanna was the first church in Rome to install electric light, Roberson notes. Indeed, the early Paulists who turned on the lights were reprimanded by Vatican officials, unconvinced that electricity had any role in churches. Nearly 70 years later, hard-eyed municipal inspectors were not impressed either with the way the pioneer system had aged. It was decrepit. Shut it down, change everything, they demanded.

The locked-out Paulists lobbied the U.S. church hierarchy for support. They appealed to a sympathetic Vatican, where, by tradition and intent, the bureaucracy is as slow as cassocks are long.

There’s much history at Santa Susanna. The current church was completed in 1603 on the ruins of a 9th-Century basilica, which seems to have been built atop a 4th-Century church--all this in honor of a saint about which little is known. Santa Susanna is said to have been martyred nearby for rejecting an importuning suitor in Roman times. But she may be legendary. So, too, St. Genesius, patron saint of actors, who is supposed to be buried in the church.

The nuns are as aware of Santa Susanna’s history as the Paulists. It was only the priests, though, who were dismayed when archeologists arrived not long ago and began digging up the sacristy floor. Mounds of their excavated dirt now rest on the floor of the church.

A 1989 Vatican proposal that would have restored the Americans to their church while safeguarding the nuns’ solitude was signed by the Paulists but not the nuns. It took an order last month from the Vatican’s secretary of state, the Pope’s prime minister, before the nuns surrendered the keys to Foley.

As for monastery chaplain Paccherini, a balding, bespectacled and imposing figure in the black-and-white cassock of his order, he says the church’s rule of priestly obedience forbids him from discussing Santa Susanna.

But he does mention in passing, without elaboration, that the American presence is a grave injustice to the nuns. Still, he allows, the nuns are satisfied with the Vatican ordered cease-fire. The Americans were abusive as guests in the church, but now they must play by written rules in respecting the nuns’ rights. Besides, he muses, Americans come, Americans go. . . . Popes change. The nuns are patient.

For his part, Foley thinks the tide has at last turned.

“I have met with the abbess, and we now speak quite amicably. We’re both in a constructive frame of mind,” he said.

“Part of the problem may have been cultural: a lack of understanding what Santa Susanna has been for Americans, and a lack of understanding among some members of the American community of Italian sensibilities.”

Pending final repairs, Foley hopes Santa Susanna will reopen at least temporarily this fall to allow Boston’s Cardinal Bernard F. Law to at last take possession of a titular church assigned him by the Pope.

If they choose, nuns of a moribund community may witness that ceremony behind an elaborate grill, which for centuries has enforced and honored their solitude.

With the prospect of peace hanging tantalizingly over Santa Susanna, Abbess Roberta Cappiotti politely declines to be interviewed, saying only, “Justice is justice, but there is also charity.”