AVRELIAE THEVDOSIAE
BENIGNISSIMAE ET
INCOMPARABILI FEMINAE
AVRELIVS OPTATVS
CONIVGI INNOCENTISSIMAE
NAT · AMBIANA.
Aurelius Optatus to his most innocent wife Aurelia Theudosia, a most gracious and incomparable woman, by nation an Ambian.
The Congregation of Relics decided that Theudosia was both a saint and martyr, and a native of Amiens. Her remains were solemnly conveyed to that city, and on the 12th of October, 1833, they were received with the utmost magnificence by no less than twenty-eight mitred prelates and fifteen hundred other ecclesiastics, placed in a gorgeous shrine, and honoured as in ancient times they honoured a tutelar goddess. Cardinal Wiseman preached on the occasion, and compared the removal of her remains to her native place to that of the patriarch Joseph’s bones from Egypt to Canaan; and Bishop Salinis commended the homage of her relics
“because the martyrs are, after Jesus Christ, also Christs to open heaven to mankind.”[246]
By this practice of the translation of relics Rome broke the chain of positive evidence, and destroyed the tender and pathetic associations connected with the remains of the sainted dead. The martyr’s tomb, in its original position and undisturbed, is an object of intensest interest; but removed to some distant church or abbey and redecorated with florid adornment or theatrical finery, his alleged relics provoke only skepticism or contempt. Indeed, so little attempt at probability is there in the names given to these relics that a Romanist writer, the Abbé Barbier de Montault, confesses that the greater part of the bodies found in the Catacombs wanting proper names have received,
when they were exposed to public veneration, names at haphazard, which have only a vague or general signification, as Felix, Fortunatus, Victor.[247]
We return from this digression to the mediæval history of the Catacombs. The efforts of Stephen III., Adrian I., and Leo III., in the eighth and ninth centuries, to restore their ancient honour and magnificence, were unavailing. The tombs of the saints were continually being abandoned and destroyed. The translation of the sacred relics was renewed with increased energy. Pope Paschal I. was the most zealous agent in the prosecution of this work. An inscription in the church of St. Prassede, which he built for their reception, records the translation thither of 2,300 bodies in a single day, July 20, A. D. 817. Successive popes continued to remove cartloads of relics from the Catacombs in order to enhance the dignity or sanctity of the churches which they built or restored, and as an evidence of their own pious zeal. At this period, probably, the multitude of relics were borne to the Pantheon, since known as St. Maria ad Martyres—
Shrine of all saints and temple of all gods
From Jove to Jesus.[248]
These perpetual spoliations of the Christian cemeteries led to the rapid destruction of many of their galleries and chambers, and to their final abandonment like a worked-out mine—a mine, too, which had been the source of greater riches to the church than treasures of silver or gold. In the removal of the relics of the martyrs the principal motive for the protection or adornment of the Catacombs was taken away, and during the gathering darkness of the Middle Ages they speedily passed out of the knowledge of mankind. In a few of those in the immediate vicinity of some church or monastery a subterranean chapel was still kept open, and an occasional mass was celebrated on the presumed anniversary of the martyr whose name was associated, often erroneously, therewith; or some zealous and adventurous pilgrim might even penetrate their obscure recesses. But a blight had fallen on the once beautiful Campagna. Desolation, pestilence, and death brooded over the deserted plain. Through the natural dilapidations of time, and the spoliations of Saracens, Normans, and Greeks, who successively invaded Italy and wasted the country with fire and sword, the basilicas and oratories of the Byzantine period crumbled to decay or were destroyed, and the monasteries were deserted; their cowled and sandaled occupants, long the sole custodians of the Catacombs, taking refuge within the city walls. The rains of a thousand autumns and the frosts of as many winters caused the crumbling of the luminari, the falling in of the roofs, and ruin of the galleries. The knowledge of the past was lost in the gathering gloom of the dark ages, so that in an enumeration of the Roman Catacombs in the fourteenth century only three are mentioned, and these were connected
with some church. In the fifteenth century but one, that of Sebastian, was known.