They call them the Saints of the Catacombs: ancient Roman corpses that were exhumed from the catacombs of Rome, received fictitious names and venerated as relics of saints from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. They were decorated with extreme lavishness, as you can see below.

But why… why would they be decorated with so much luxury? Were they really buried like this or did something else happen? Well, they’re not really saints in the strict sense, although some of them may have creepy Christian martyr motifs. During the 15th century, Western Europe was shaken by the Beeldenstorm (the fury of statues), a term used for outbreaks of destruction of religious images. During these waves of iconoclasm, Catholic art and many forms of church fixtures and decoration were destroyed in unofficial or mob actions.

In 1803, the secular magistrate of Rothenburg, in Bavaria, auctioned the city’s two saints. 174 years later, in 1977, city residents raised funds to recover them, but for the most part, the catacomb saints were forgotten and discarded.

But it was time to return to the spotlight in 2013, when Paul Koudounaris revived interest in them with his new book, where he attempted to photograph and document each and every one of the catacomb saints. It is unclear whether this measure was ever effective, but in the 19th century, they became an embarrassment to Vatican authorities, who saw certificates identifying them as martyrs instead of putting the bones in boxes and decorating them with jewelry, gold. and silver, mostly by nuns.

They had to be managed by those who had made a sacred vow to the church; They were believers who had taken a sacred vow to be martyrs and could not allow just anyone to manage them. The reason they were so important was not because of their spiritual merit, which was quite dubious, but because of their social importance.