PRESERVING THE TRADITIONS.  Rome's station churches become part of the curriculum for the Pontifical North American College.

Starting in the mid-1970s, they began reviving the tradition and making a daily pilgrimage to each church on the Lenten circuit, paying tribute to early Christians who risked their lives to worship.

The tradition caught on with a wider group. And today, the Masses are often standing room only events.

“You think: ‘on this day for 1,300 years Christians have been going to this church on this day,’” said Deacon Riley Williams, of Cape Cod, Mass., who is in his fourth year at the North American College. “Going to this place where the saints died, it joins us to Christ.”

Poland’s ambassador to the Holy See, Hanna Suchocka, has been a regular for years, a dean of sorts of the lay crowd who flock to the Masses and attend the de rigueur cappuccino and cornetti run afterward at a nearby cafe. The breakfast – the Roman equivalent of coffee and doughnuts in the church hall after Mass – has in recent years become almost as much of a tradition as the service itself.

The new tradition began with some independent study by the former Archbishop of Milwaukee.

Faith aside, the 40-day itinerary is a great way to see Rome, with daily pre-dawn walks through the Eternal City’s silent streets to visit some of the world’s oldest and most beautiful places of Christian worship, some of which aren’t open except on their station days.

Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, brings the faithful to Santa Sabina, where according to tradition, the widow Sabina was converted to Christianity by her slave in the 2nd century and both were later killed for it.

Pope Benedict XVI celebrated Ash Wednesday there just as popes from earliest Christianity visited station churches to unify the faithful.

Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York is often credited with having helped revive the tradition while a student at the North American College in the 1970s, when he said he and a friend used to research the station church of the day and walk there for a visit.

Dolan returned to the college in 1994 as rector and found that the ritual had stuck, albeit informally.

“I said ‘Bravo, let’s put this on steroids. Let’s make this part of our college Lenten spiritual regimen,’” Dolan said last week from New York. “It’s an act of penance. Is there anything colder, damper than taking off on a dark Roman morning ... to walk a half hour to a church? That’s what Lent is all about.”

On April 14, the seminarians gathered at the college’s front gate at dawn and hiked down the Janiculum hill, crossed the bridge over the Tiber and snaked their way through back cobblestone streets to Sant’Apollinare, once a Jesuit church that now belongs to the conservative Opus Dei movement.

Walking in a chilly rain is a less painful form of mortification of the flesh than Dan Brown would have you believe is an obligation of Opus Dei.  But perhaps those North American pilgrims will inspire a more recent tradition: a Friday fish fry at the cafe adjacent to the station churches whose turn it is to open on Friday.