In a bonanza for the Catholic fight-back a great series of subterranean tunnels was found in Rome in 1578, filled with the bodies of early Christians. It was assumed that they had been buried there because they had been persecuted and these ‘catacomb saints’ were exported by the Jesuits all over the Catholic world as superb instances of the primitive sufferings of the True Church. In fact they were the skeletons of pious but ordinary Romans who, having blamelessly lain in the dark for a millennium, now found themselves landed with a random Christian name, canonized and put on a mule cart.
