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Updated: June 6, 2025
Do you not feel that if these martyrs had not come to pray beneath these vaults eighteen hundred years ago, the best part of your soul would not exist? Where will you find a poetry more touching than that of these symbols and of these epitaphs? That admirable De Rossi showed me one at Saint Calixtus last year. My tears flow as I recall it.
Consider that with Calixtus III's assumption of the Tiara Rome became the Spaniard's happy hunting-ground, and that into the Eternal City streamed in their hundreds the Catalan adventurers priests, clerks, captains of fortune, and others who came to seek advancement at the hands of a Catalan Pope. This Spanish invasion Rome resented. She grew restive under it.
The new Abbess thus appointed was the Madre Matilda de Borgia, a relation of Pope Calixtus, very noble, and of Spanish birth, as the Commissioner assured the nuns; but they had never heard of her before, and were not at all gratified.
During her last awful moments, as she left this world with the torture of the flames slowly consuming her body, what were the last impressions of this girl of nineteen who left home and happiness to free a people who allowed her to be thus tormented to death? "A court was constituted by Pope Calixtus III., in 1455, which declared her innocent and pronounced her trial unjust.
The crusade undertaken by Pope Calixtus III. against the invading Saracens, was waged with redoubled ardor on the sudden appearance of the star with the flaming tail. Mahomet II. took Constantinople by storm, and raised the siege of Belgrade.
Some two months afterwards the following paragraph made the round of the European Press: "One of the most interesting discoveries of recent years is that of the new catacomb in Rome, which lies some distance to the east of the well-known vaults of St. Calixtus.
Infidelity's idea of the message of the Bible followed the Christian like a wild beast, and in the catacomb of Calixtus drew from the pursued soul the pathetic exclamation: "Oh, sorrowful times, when we can not even in caves escape our foes!" And all this was true, because they said, "Recompense to no man evil for evil"; "Pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute you."
Calixtus, informed him that he of whom he was in search had left half an hour before. "You will find him at the Basilica of Saint Neree and Saint Achilles," added the Trappist; "it is the fete of those two saints, and at five o'clock there will be a procession in their catacombs.... It is a fifteen minutes' ride from here, near the tower Marancia, on the Via Ardeatina."
Even to the end of our life we shall deplore the faults which have brought this experience home to us; and may it please Gad that our uncle Calixtus of blessed memory bear not this day in purgatory the burden of our sins, more heavy, alas, than his own! Ah, he was rich in every virtue, he was full of good intentions; but he loved too much his own people, and among them he loved me chief.
Nicholas died shortly afterwards, just when he was preparing an expedition against the Turks. His successor, Calixtus III., carried out his design, and equipped a fleet of sixteen galleys. This fleet required a commander of energy, resolution, and celebrity.
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