Catacomb Saints: Who the Jeweled Skeletons of Europe Were and Why They Were Decorated

A catacomb saint is a set of remains from one of Rome's ancient underground burial places, identified by Church authorities as the body of an early Christian martyr and given to a community elsewhere in Europe. According to the publisher's description of Paul Koudounaris's book *Heavenly Bodies*, the movement began after news spread in 1578 of an underground Roman burial complex. Church authorities and local Catholic communities treated many of the remains found there as martyrs, gave them names and sent them north, especially to German-speaking lands. The practice lasted from the late sixteenth century into the nineteenth.

The numbers were large. The historian Trevor Johnson documented their distribution across Bavaria in his article "Holy Fabrications", and Noria Litaker, in her book *Bedazzled Saints*, traces nearly 400 "holy bodies" sent from the Roman catacombs to Bavaria alone between 1590 and 1803.

Who these people were in life is, for most of them, unknown. Koudounaris, as the Rijksmuseum's summary of his book notes, emphasizes that many identities were never established historically. The names they carry today were given to them as relics.

To understand why a town in Bavaria or Switzerland would send to Rome for a skeleton, it helps to remember what the sixteenth century had done to northern European churches. Protestant reformers and iconoclast movements had removed or destroyed many images, shrines and relics. For Catholic communities, a complete body from Rome could restore a church's sacred standing, connect the local people directly to the first Christians and give them a focus for processions, feast days and pilgrimage. During the Counter-Reformation, the Holy Bodies also became a visible statement of Catholic identity.

Getting one was a religious act and a civic one. Communities welcomed the bodies with processions, set them on prominent altars and sometimes adopted them as local patrons. Litaker shows that Bavarian religious and secular communities alike invested a great deal of labor and money in turning incomplete remains into whole-body saints, and an Associated Press report from Banz, quoting Walter Ries, follows the same story in one Bavarian church. A major relic could raise a church's status and draw pilgrims.

The arrival of a Holy Body was a public event. In 1647 the remains called Leontius were carried from Rome to the Benedictine abbey church at Muri, in Switzerland, in a solemn procession that the historian Urs Amacher documents in his book *Der Katakombenheilige Leontius von Muri*. On September 26, 1694, parish groups processed to Vornbach to welcome the catacomb saint Clarus into Bavaria, as Litaker describes in her chapter on translation processions.

Some churches gathered their saints over generations. At Waldsassen, in Bavaria, the first Holy Body arrived in 1688 and the tenth in 1765, according to a study of the basilica by Koudounaris hosted by Duke University. That is nearly eighty years of waiting, receiving and decorating.

The bones did not arrive looking like the figures in the photographs. Turning them into saints was careful, collaborative work, much of it done by nuns trained in preparing relics. As Angela Hesson describes in her essay "Catacomb Saints", they stabilized and assembled the bones using animal glue, wire, gauze, wax, wood and papier-mâché. The Dominican sisters of Ennetach, in southern Germany, were especially skilled at it, articulating the bones and applying the textiles.

Goldsmiths and metalworkers then added filigree, textiles, crowns, armor, glass, pearls and gemstones. At Waldsassen, a trained goldsmith and lay brother named Adalbart Eder decorated ten bodies with jewels, embroidered finery and metalwork. At Banz, in Bavaria, nuns from nearby Bamberg decorated four skeletons brought from Rome in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the AP reports.

The finished saints were posed as complete figures rather than left as loose bones.

The jewels can look like extravagance to modern eyes, but they carried a religious message. The historian Günter Dippold explains, in the AP's report from Banz, that the richly adorned bodies were meant to represent glorified bodies after the resurrection, not corpses dressed up for spectacle. The silk, gold and armor showed the saint as Catholics believed the saint now was: complete, honored and in glory. The martyr's palm marked each one as a martyr.

Taste and belief shifted. Enlightenment criticism, Catholic reform, secularization and changing attitudes toward relics all challenged the practice of presenting anonymous bones as named saints. Some Holy Bodies were taken down from their altars, hidden in crypts or vaults, stripped of their decoration, sold, buried or destroyed.

In Bavaria, the secularization of 1802 and 1803 closed monasteries and led to the sale or removal of many church furnishings, as Litaker describes in her chapter on the modern era. At Rottenbuch in 1803, state officials recommended removing or selling shrines containing "purportedly holy bodies, bones, heads."

Not every community gave them up. Some local devotions continued, and surviving bodies remain in churches in Bavaria, Austria, Switzerland, Czechia and Italy. Waldsassen kept its collection, and its Holy Bodies celebration, approved in 1756, continued into the modern period.

The Waldsassen Basilica in Bavaria holds one of the best-known groups. The town's official tourism page says the basilica contains twelve relics of early Christian martyrs from the Roman catacombs, displayed as richly dressed Holy Bodies, and that the church is open daily. Koudounaris's study of the basilica counts ten full-body relics in the nave. A photograph of one of the Waldsassen saints by K.Baas is available on Wikimedia Commons under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

At the former monastery church of Banz, in Bad Staffelstein, Bavaria, four Holy Bodies named Vincenzius, Valerius, Benedictus and Felix Benedictus remain on display, the AP reported in 2026. Wooden panels cover their cases for much of the year, and the bodies are shown on special occasions such as All Saints' Day.

In Switzerland, the parish church of St. Kolumban and Konstantius in Rorschach is another church to ask about, and in Wil, a parish document identifies the baroque silver reliquary of the catacomb saint Pankratius in St. Nikolaus as part of the city's religious art collection.

These are working churches and places of prayer, and some keep their saints covered except on feast days. Confirm access, display status, hours and photography rules with each parish or basilica before you visit.

These questions follow naturally from the story.

The catacomb saints are one of several ways Catholic Europe has kept its dead in view. The friars' bone chapel in Rome is told in the story of the Capuchin Crypt, and our guide to ossuaries around the world visits other places where bones are arranged with care. For the skull's long role in Christian art and devotion, read skulls in Christianity.