Word: catacomb
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Digger Ferrua believes that the catacomb, to judge from its artistic style, dates from the 4th century A.D. It was probably the burial place of a group of families and not used for religious ceremonies. This would account for its absence from ecclesiastical records. Many of the pictures are about obscure subjects, and much work will have to be done before their significance can be determined...
Most archaeological discoveries are made by arduous searching; in age-old Rome they sometimes force themselves on the diggers' attention. This week the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano told about a catacomb that had to call for attention twice before it got noticed...
...ancient street branching off the Appian Way, noticed small holes in the earth. The news was passed to the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology, which ordered Engineer Mario di Santa Maria to excavate further. Entering through a shaft bored in the ground, he and his colleagues penetrated an elaborate catacomb, but found that all loose objects of value had disappeared. Fact was that the catacomb had been discovered 20 years before, and covered quietly by the landowners to avoid an official veto on building over...
...Catacomb Christians. The Ninety and Nine takes its title from the book of Luke: "Joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance." In due course the sinner appears, but the book's hero is on the scene from Page One, a Roman Catholic priest, about to travel the age-old road to martyrdom. Jesuit Father Janos is a good priest and a soldier of Christ in his heart, but he has had to fight few battles for the Christian faith in Roman Catholic Hungary. Then...
...eternal: "The mills of God grind smaller than those of the Communists, and one day they will pulverize them." When the official mills of the Communists grind out a law disbanding religious orders, Father Janos bids his fellow Jesuits go underground, or abroad, and himself becomes a modern catacomb Christian. But the secret police soon snap him up and jail him as a conspirator in a trumped-up "deviationist" plot against the state...