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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hello and happy Friday. I'm Holly Fry.

And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

We talked about the catacombs of Rome this week.

Yeah.

This is one where I felt almost a little guilty because there's so much scholarship about it,

giving a brief overview.

I feel like I'm leaving so much stuff out.

But there was one particular recent development that was pretty interesting to me that isn't really germane

to the catacombs as an entity themselves. It's a thing that references the catacombs. So in

1965, there was a meeting or a mass, depending on which source you read, held in the catacombs of Domitia.

There were 40 bishops there.

They were in Rome for the second Vatican Council.

And they had this meeting there to discuss the way that the clergy and particularly the bishops were living and their lifestyle and its lack of alignment with the people that they were pledged to serve.

Sure.

So this resulted in a document which is called the Pact of the Catecombs, where these bishops

committed to live their lives as the average man, basically like renouncing their life of

privilege, holding no land, like any land that any of them had.

They were supposed to sign over to the church.

They, you know, were not supposed to wear fancy vestments even.

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