Decent Films Blog
Update #4: Catacombs of St. Callixtus!
Tuesday afternoon after the papal Pallium Mass, the itinerary includes the catacombs of St. Callixtus and St. Paul’s Outside the Walls. I missed the catacombs on my first trip to Rome, so I’m really looking forward to this.
The visit to the catacombs begins with a brief introduction to the history and iconography of the period and the site. While the pagan Romans traditionally practiced cremation, the early Christians, in continuity with Jewish belief and custom refocused and refined in light of the resurrection of Jesus, placed a high premium on burying the dead in preparation for their rising. Because land was limited, starting in the second century Roman Christians (and Jews; a small number of Roman catacombs are of Jewish origin) acquired plots of land outside the city limits and dug massive underground labyrinths in the soft volcanic rock of the Roman countryside, carving out niches for burying the dead. The uniqueness of Judeo-Christian hope was even evident in the language they used: The standard pagan term for a burial site was “necropolis,” city of the dead, but the Christians early began calling their catacombs by a new name, “cemetery,” a term literally meaning “dormitory” or “place of sleep.”
Like many people, I once vaguely imagined the early Christians hiding out from Roman persecutions in the catacombs. In fact the catacombs were publicly known sites, not secret (our tour guide points out, commonsensically, that excavating tons of earth and rock along, say, the Appian Way could hardly be a surreptitious undertaking). The kernel of truth to the Hollywood picture is that during persecutions when Christian rites of worship could not openly be celebrated, Christians retreated to their underground burial sites, sacrosanct under Roman law, to celebrate the Eucharistic liturgy.
