Rome’s St. Paul’s Within the Walls celebrates 150 years as a place of welcome in the eternal city

[Episcopal News Service] On Jan. 25, 1873, on the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, workers laid the cornerstone of St. Paul’s Within the Walls Episcopal Church, the first non-Roman Catholic church built inside Rome’s ancient walls.

The land was purchased, and construction began in 1872, two years after Italian forces captured Rome and the unification of Italy was complete, which brought a constitution protecting religious freedom and the end of papal rule in the city. In March 1876, the red brick and travertine Gothic Revival church was consecrated.

St. Paul’s will celebrate the consecration’s 150th anniversary year with a special Evening Prayer on June 26. California Bishop Austin K. Rios, who served 12 years as St. Paul’s priest-in-charge, will preach, and Bishop Mark Edington of the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe will preside.

Although the church’s founders leaned into Protestantism and displayed a somewhat antagonist need to express their own brand of catholicism in the eternal city, over time St. Paul’s was called both to represent The Episcopal Church in Rome and to communicate its understanding of catholicism as not just the Vatican or the Roman Catholic Church, but the larger calling as presented in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, emphasizing parallel liturgies, shared roots and Catholic-Anglican ecumenism, Rios told Episcopal News Service.

“Being in Rome felt to me like we were touching on those roots all the time, and they were alive; it wasn’t just a dead past, it was something that was giving life to the present and to the future,” he said. As in John 15:5, “I am the vine, you are the branches.”

What began as an American outpost for U.S. Embassy personnel, merchants, industrialists and tourists 100 years later welcomed Africans in the diaspora, and in the 1980s, founded the Joel Nafuma Refugee Center and established a Latino ministry. Later, it welcomed the LGBTQ+ community, establishing the first inclusive space for queer Christians and their allies in Rome.

Michelle Ruelle found St. Paul’s in 2023 while searching for an inclusive Christian community. Born in the United States and raised Roman Catholic, in her youth she left the church and later self-identified as “unchurched.” She has lived the last 25 years in Rome, where she returned to Catholic Mass while her son took catechism classes, a rite of passage for Italian teens in what is largely a secular society. The classes required a parent to sign a document committing them to take the student to church on Sunday.

She fulfilled her obligation but continued to attend because she liked the Gospel stories and the revolutionary character, Jesus.

Yet, at the same time, she had many LGBTQ+ friends, her then 12-year-old daughter came out as gay, and eventually she couldn’t reconcile some of the Roman Catholic Church’s teachings. “You’re never going to get away, especially here in Rome, from the messages coming from the pulpit about gender theory. … Or if you are divorced, don’t come up for Communion,” said Ruelle, who is divorced. “I was always making excuses, concessions … then finally I was just like, I can’t anymore, now that my daughter has come out. I can’t feel safe in a place where I don’t know if somebody from the pulpit is going to say gay people are an abomination.”

So, she left, feeling sad because she’d discovered the beauty of Christianity but had no place to worship. A year later, she typed the words “inclusive Christian denomination” into Google, and it delivered “The Episcopal Church.”

“And on that particular day on the homepage, they had the LGBTQ flag, and I remember thinking, wait a second, I was looking for a Christian community, these people are Christian, and they’re proclaiming they’re supporting LGBTQ rights. What is this about? I got so excited, but then I was like, oh, but of course they’re not going to be here in Rome.” She’d landed on The Episcopal Church’s denominational website and then discovered its branch in Rome: St. Paul’s Within the Walls.

“Day one, it was like home; it was so great. I have been there ever since,” said Ruelle, who became a vestry member and is in the process of becoming a deacon.

St. Paul’s reputation for affirming and welcoming the LGBTQ+ community is one thing that draws people who, for historical, social, and political reasons, aren’t able to feel at home in their local church in Rome.

“That’s one of the pillars of our ministry as The Episcopal Church in Rome. … We were the first and still only official church body to participate in Pride,” said Conner Drennen, one of St. Paul’s co-wardens. “There are other grassroots organizations and religious ecumenical groups — we all march all together — but we remain the only officially sanctioned church body.”

For Harrison Wade, an Arkansan raised in the Southern Baptist tradition, St. Paul’s offered a welcoming space where he could express his true identity. Wade moved to Rome for graduate school and stayed to work in environmental sustainability. He began attending a Reformed Baptist church, but as a gay man, he felt he couldn’t be himself. When he and his Italian partner, a Roman Catholic, attended services together, Wade would introduce him as a friend.

“But whenever we came to St. Paul’s, we could sit next to each other, we could be a couple. It wasn’t like it was a political statement or anything … I felt immediately accepted, and the more I attended, the more I felt at home.”

Still, Wade said, to go from being a Southern Baptist to becoming an Episcopalian wasn’t an easy decision. “I remember praying for a sign, and there was one sermon that was just super evident that God was talking to me and saying, like, ‘Harrison, you have a home here at this church,’ and I made some of my closest friends at St. Paul’s.”

St. Paul’s is not the only church in the Anglican tradition in Rome, but it is the only Episcopal congregation among some 900 churches.

“People come here for community, and they experience community in a way that they haven’t before, or quite often haven’t, and then they also see the diversity of God’s people together at the table, together in song, together in prayer, and it’s breathtaking,” the Rev. Jonathan Evans, who became St. Paul’s priest-in-charge in August 2025, told ENS. “I don’t want to say that we are better, but this is a very special place and I’m lucky to serve here.”

St. Paul’s also lives into its call to promote human rights, intercommunity dialogue and public witness in response to global events.

Last fall, for two months, the church dedicated one Evening Prayer service a week to the tragedy unfolding in Gaza, praying particularly for an end to the killing. In late November, it hosted “Christ Died in Gaza,” an exhibition by Gianluca Costantini, an Italian artist who’d been documenting journalists’ deaths and other atrocities since the start of the Israel-Hamas war. One image depicted Mary as a Palestinian woman holding a dead child, a nod to Michelangelo’s Pieta.

“It was a very powerful Christian-meets-Palestinian-meets-social-justice message,” Drennen told ENS. “We opened it to our ecumenical partners and, of course, to the Palestinian community.”

The event coincided with a demonstration in solidarity with Palestinians across Europe. The Palestinian ambassador to Italy spoke at St. Paul’s event, which included testimony, music and prayer, as well as art.

“It was a very meaningful event for St. Paul’s, of course, but again, it’s that idea that St. Paul’s [as with its welcome to LGBTQ+ people] is uniquely positioned to offer space, resources, people, community, prayer in a way that most other churches in Rome are not,” Drennen said.

In February, St. Paul’s brought together Christian communities, human rights advocates and members of the local Iranian community in a shared act of remembrance, solidarity and reflection dedicated to the tens of thousands of people killed by authorities in Iran in early January.

William Aswell, a St. Paul’s parishioner, had approached Evans with the need as Christians “to recognize this as an absolute moral outrage.”

“Father Jonathan was incredibly supportive, and we’d only known each other for a couple of months,” Aswell told ENS. “He’s such a wonderfully open and supportive priest.”

They agreed to plan the event, so long as it didn’t take on pro-Zionist or pro-Shah themes.

“Anglicanism is the ecumenical bridge in Rome, because we can do events that the Vatican is too politically encumbered or responsible to do,” Aswell told ENS. “And every seat was packed. We picked the right venue, the right event, the right message, and it just resonated. I really believe it was the spirit moving.”

Under St. Paul’s cornerstone, its founders placed a brick from Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was included as a symbol of hope, as expressed by St. Paul’s first rector, the Rev. Robert Jenkins Nevin, a former Union artillery officer who fought in the Civil War.

The new church would be “a constant visible witness … that religious liberty and the rights of human conscience have at last found a home in the city of popes and Caesars,” said Nevin as quoted in a historical book and guide to St. Paul’s written by Judith Rice Millon and first published in 1982.

Continuing to build on the cornerstone

“The refugee center is one piece of it, the ecumenical work is one piece of it, the liturgy, participating in and hosting events – all of it exemplifies what The Episcopal Church has always been about; and that is the Anglican tradition, which is loving, welcoming and, in humility, being open to possibilities,” the Rev. Charles Robertson, senior adviser to the presiding bishop, told ENS.

St. Paul’s Within the Walls, Robertson added, models St. Augustine’s example in Kent. “It’s taking what you know and what you learn and bringing it together. That to me has always been the middle way; it’s not compromised, lukewarm or wishy-washy. … It’s what works in context, and that’s Anglicanism at its best.”

He added that it was significant that Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally, in her first preaching visitation outside England following her installation, preached at St. Paul’s. “It said something about her expansive view of Anglicans and of the Anglican presence in Europe and elsewhere,” said Robertson, who will attend the 150^th anniversary Evening Prayer.

St. Paul’s “stands as a quiet yet powerful sign of Christian presence, witness and hope – hope that division is not the final word, hope that the church, though wounded, is not beyond healing,” Mullally, the 106th archbishop of Canterbury and the first woman to hold the office in its 1,400-year history, said during her April 26 homily.

St. Paul’s is part of the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe, which is present in eight countries. As far back as 1981, the Rev. Wilbur Woodhams, the rector at the time, noted a “great change” in the parish’s mission with the church becoming a cosmopolitan, all-embracing faith, still rooted in the Anglican tradition but without the “exclusiveness” that had characterized its mission in Rome. In 1992, “it offered a multi-cultural, multi-lingual, multi-national and multi-ethnic community working in harmony,” wrote the Rev. Michael Vono, then rector, who went on to become the bishop of the Diocese of the Rio Grande.

“What was historically a church for upper-middle-class American expats stationed in Italy for a couple of years with no intention of integrating has become a parish of people who call Rome home and don’t have plans to change that,” Drennen said. “Today we’re not just the American church; we have, of course, the important Latin American community, African community, and a growing native Roman community, which to me represents a big part of what St. Paul’s could be in the future.

“Today [St. Paul’s] represents a place that is open, firmly bilingual, multicultural in a way that it never expected itself to be, and so we’re met today with this nexus of all these intersecting pieces and parts and stories that are looking for a home. And so, it’s a process of understanding together with the community as it changes who we are and who we’re called to be.”

-Lynette Wilson is managing editor of Episcopal News Service. She can be reached at lwilson@episcopalchurch.org.