https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catacomb_of_Callixtus
I am borrowing this story from a subscription email I get from Rod Dreher. He is an Orthodox Christian. He was recently in Rome and visited these catacombs. I find it very comforting to think about how those of us who are Catholic and Orthodox are directly connected with the Christians of the 1st through 5th centuries who created these sacred spaces and created some of the first, if not the first, Christian art.
Excerpts from Dreher's missive:
See third picture below.
I am borrowing this story from a subscription email I get from Rod Dreher. He is an Orthodox Christian. He was recently in Rome and visited these catacombs. I find it very comforting to think about how those of us who are Catholic and Orthodox are directly connected with the Christians of the 1st through 5th centuries who created these sacred spaces and created some of the first, if not the first, Christian art.
Excerpts from Dreher's missive:
see first picture below.Quote:
the Catacombs of St. Callixtos, a 12-mile underground city where the Christians of Rome buried their dead from the 1st century until the 5th. It's one of the most important sites of the early church; it had been lost to history until its rediscovery and excavation in the 19th century.
see second picture below.Quote:
At least nine early popes were interred here, as well as hundreds of martyrs. Above, there is one of the earliest examples of Christian art we have: the Last Supper. There are seven persons seated there, because seven is the number of perfection in the Bible.
Also, look at this image of Christ with a Gospel, next to the original crypt of the martyred St. Cecelia (whose body was moved to the church in Trastevere that bears her name, and which was ordered built in the 3rd century by Pope Urban I, over what had been her house. Notice that the Lord appears to be beardless here. The guide said this image is from the 4th century:
Quote:
(this is) the body of Cecilia, virgin martyr of the early 3rd century (it is thought), lay in a coffin until the coffin was transferred in 822 to the church that bears her name. The statue is a copy of the one that lies over her tomb in her church in Trastevere. In 1599, the saint's coffin was discovered during a renovation of the church, and the Pope at the time asked for it to be opened. In the presence of a crowd of witnesses, they discovered that her body was entirely incorrupt meaning that it had not decayed. It was lying in the same position in which she died. The Pope exhibited her incorrupt body to the crowds of the faithful, and then commissioned a sculpture in its likeness.
See third picture below.
