MERCY TOURS
Your Catholic pilgrimage resource
A Spiritual and Cultural experience
Furthermore such out-of-the-way areas, especially during the persecutions, were very apt for reserved community meetings and for the free displaying of the Christian symbols. These symbols were depicted on the walls of the catacombs, and more often, carved on the marble slabs, which sealed the tombs. The main symbols are:
The Good Shepherd: with a lamb around his shoulders represents Christ and the soul, which He has saved.
The Good Shepherd: with a lamb around his shoulders represents Christ and the soul, which He has saved. The “Orante”: this praying figure with open arms symbolizes the soul, which lives in divine peace.
The “Orante”: this praying figure with open arms symbolizes the soul, which lives in divine peace. The Chi Ro: the monogram of Christ formed by interlacing two letters of the Greek alphabet, X (chi) and P (ro) that are the first two letters of the Greek word “Christos”. When this monogram was placed on a tombstone, it meant a Christian was buried there.
The Chi Ro: the monogram of Christ formed by interlacing two letters of the Greek alphabet, X (chi) and P (ro) that are the first two letters of the Greek word “Christos”. When this monogram was placed on a tombstone, it meant a Christian was buried there.The Fish: in Greek, IXTHYS (ichtus). It’s an acronym for the phrase Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior. The symbol was created due to the threat of death when the Church was under intense persecution. A believer would draw half of the fish in the dirt and another would complete the drawing in order to communicate their shared faith.
The Fish: in Greek, IXTHYS (ichtus). It’s an acronym for the phrase Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior. The symbol was created due to the threat of death when the Church was under intense persecution. A believer would draw half of the fish in the dirt and another would complete the drawing in order to communicate their shared faith. 
The early Christians started burying their dead underground, which is how the catacombs were founded. The Christians felt a lively community sense: they wished to be together even in the “sleep of death”. The Christian belief in the Resurrection is obvious from the language: the Roman pagans used the term "necropolis" (city of the dead), whereas the Christians used the term "cemetery", meaning dormitory or place of sleep. It is in the catacombs that Christians also celebrated the Eucharist in the early days of the Church when the practice of Christianity was forbidden under punishment of death.
There are more than sixty catacombs in Rome, with hundreds of miles of galleries and tens of thousands of tombs. The Christians of the first centuries bore a wonderful witness to Christ; many of them even by the shedding of their blood, so that martyrdom has become a glorious mark of the Church. The early Christians testified their faith everywhere, but it was in the catacombs that those heroic Christians found the strength and support to face the trials and persecutions, as they prayed to God through the martyrs’ intercession. Here the Christians gathered to celebrate their funeral rites, the anniversaries of the martyrs and of the dead. In exceptional cases, the catacombs were used as places of momentary refuge for the celebration of the Eucharist. In the catacombs everything speaks of life more than death.
They speak to our minds and hearts in a silent and understandable language. Every gallery we pass through, every symbol or painting we see, every inscription we read brings the past to life and gives a message of faith, of Christian testimony, and expresses the life and martyrdom of the Roman Church of the first centuries.
