''Fabiola or, the Church of the Catacombs'' is a novel by the English
Cardinal
Cardinal or The Cardinal may refer to:
Animals
* Cardinal (bird) or Cardinalidae, a family of North and South American birds
**''Cardinalis'', genus of cardinal in the family Cardinalidae
**''Cardinalis cardinalis'', or northern cardinal, the ...
Nicholas Wiseman
Nicholas Patrick Stephen Wiseman (3 August 1802 – 15 February 1865) was a Cardinal of the Catholic Church who became the first Archbishop of Westminster upon the re-establishment of the Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales in 1850.
Born ...
. It was first published in 1854. The novel has been adapted to film three times.
Plot summary
The story is set in Rome the early 4th century AD, during the time of the persecution of Christians under the Roman Emperor
Diocletian
Diocletian (; la, Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus, grc, Διοκλητιανός, Diokletianós; c. 242/245 – 311/312), nicknamed ''Iovius'', was Roman emperor from 284 until his abdication in 305. He was born Gaius Valerius Diocles ...
.
The heroine of the book is Fabiola, a young beauty from a noble Roman family. She is spoiled by her father Fabius, who cannot deny her anything. Fabiola seems to have everything, including a superior education in the philosophers, yet under the surface, she is not content with her life. One day, in a fit of rage, she attacks and wounds her slave girl Syra, who is a secret Christian. The proud, spoiled Roman girl is humbled by Syra's humility, maturity and devotion to her in this situation, and a slow transformation begins, which finally culminates in her conversion to Christianity, brought on by Syra and of her own cousin Agnes, whom she adores and dotes on.
Another thread of the story deals with the young boy Pancratius, a pious Christian and son of a martyr, who is himself preparing for martyrdom. Pancratius' nemesis is Corvinus, a bullying schoolmate who is irritated by the young Christian's saintliness. He does everything to bring him and the Christian community of the
catacombs of Rome
The Catacombs of Rome ( it, Catacombe di Roma) are ancient catacombs, underground burial places in and around Rome, of which there are at least forty, some rediscovered only in recent decades. Though most famous for Christian burials, either i ...
down. This includes the orchestrating of the lynching of their former teacher Cassianus, who is secretly Christian. Yet Pancratius shows his enemy the meaning of Christian forgiveness when he saves his life shortly after Corvinus had Cassianus killed.
Another major villain in the story is the enigmatic Fulvius, an apparently rich young man from the East who soon reveals himself to be a hunter of Christians who turns them in to the authorities for money. His aim on the one hand is to gain the hand of either Fabiola or Agnes, and on the other hand, to uproot the Christian community in Rome. After some dramatic events that reveal his surprising connections to Syra, who is his long-lost younger sister Myriam, Fulvius rejects his evil ways, converts to Christianity and becomes a
hermit
A hermit, also known as an eremite (adjectival form: hermitic or eremitic) or solitary, is a person who lives in seclusion. Eremitism plays a role in a variety of religions.
Description
In Christianity, the term was originally applied to a Ch ...
.
Characters
The story also weaves a number of
martyrdom
A martyr (, ''mártys'', "witness", or , ''marturia'', stem , ''martyr-'') is someone who suffers persecution and death for advocating, renouncing, or refusing to renounce or advocate, a religious belief or other cause as demanded by an external ...
accounts and
legend
A legend is a Folklore genre, genre of folklore that consists of a narrative featuring human actions, believed or perceived, both by teller and listeners, to have taken place in human history. Narratives in this genre may demonstrate human valu ...
s of real-life Christian
saint
In religious belief, a saint is a person who is recognized as having an exceptional degree of Q-D-Š, holiness, likeness, or closeness to God. However, the use of the term ''saint'' depends on the context and Christian denomination, denominat ...
s into the fictitious story. These include
Saint Agnes
Agnes of Rome () is a virgin martyr, venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church, Oriental Orthodox Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church, as well as the Anglican Communion and Lutheran Churches. St. Agnes is one of several virgin martyrs co ...
,
Saint Sebastian
Saint Sebastian (in Latin: ''Sebastianus''; Narbo, Gallia Narbonensis, Roman Empire c. AD 255 – Rome, Italia, Roman Empire c. AD 288) was an early Christian saint and martyr. According to traditional belief, he was killed during the Dioclet ...
Saint Cassian
Cassian, or Saint Cassian of Imola, or Cassius was a Christian saint of the 4th century. His feast day is August 13.
Life
Little is known about his life, although the traditional accounts converge on some of the details of his martyrdom. He was ...
(Cassianus),
Saint Emerentiana
Saint Emerentiana was a Roman martyr, who lived around the start of the 4th century. Her feast day is January 23.
Legend
According to the legend of St. Agnes, Emerentiana was her foster-sister.Saint Tarcisius. Two exceptions are the characters of Fabiola and of the blind beggar girl Caecilia, Syra's friend and fellow Christian; though they do bear saints' names, are not identical with
Saint Fabiola
Fabiola was a nurse (physician) and Roman matron of rank of the company of noble Roman women who, under the influence of the Church father Jerome, gave up all earthly pleasures and devoted themselves to the practice of Christian asceticism and ch ...
(who lived later) and
Saint Cecilia
Saint Cecilia ( la, Sancta Caecilia), also spelled Cecelia, was a Roman virgin martyr and is venerated in Catholic, Eastern Orthodox Church, Orthodox, Anglican Communion, Anglican, and some Lutheran churches, such as the Church of Sweden. She b ...
(whose legend is very different from Caecilia's story in the novel).
Background
Wiseman wrote ''Fabiola'' in part as an answer to the book ''
Hypatia
Hypatia, Koine pronunciation (born 350–370; died 415 AD) was a neoplatonist philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician, who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, then part of the Eastern Roman Empire. She was a prominent thinker in Alexandria wher ...
'', written by the Anglican
Charles Kingsley
Charles Kingsley (12 June 1819 – 23 January 1875) was a broad church priest of the Church of England, a university professor, social reformer, historian, novelist and poet. He is particularly associated with Christian socialism, the working ...
. The novel was mainly aimed at the embattled
Catholic
The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics worldwide . It is among the world's oldest and largest international institutions, and has played a ...
minority in England, who had recently emerged from a half-illegal status (the Catholic
hierarchy
A hierarchy (from Greek: , from , 'president of sacred rites') is an arrangement of items (objects, names, values, categories, etc.) that are represented as being "above", "below", or "at the same level as" one another. Hierarchy is an important ...
in England had been re-established only in 1850).
The story thus constantly stresses the close-knit community of the early Christians, their love for each other, their solidarity strong sense of communion. At the same time, direct references to the present situation of Catholics in England are relatively rare, especially when compared to
John Henry Newman
John Henry Newman (21 February 1801 – 11 August 1890) was an English theologian, academic, intellectual, philosopher, polymath, historian, writer, scholar and poet, first as an Anglican ministry, Anglican priest and later as a Catholi ...
's '' Callista'' (1855), which was commissioned as a sort of "prequel" to ''Fabiola''. Still, the heroic language in which the tales of the martyrs are told obviously aims at strengthening the courage and determination of Catholics in England. The educational side of the book is also important: several chapters digress on historical information about
worship
Worship is an act of religious devotion usually directed towards a deity. It may involve one or more of activities such as veneration, adoration, praise, and praying. For many, worship is not about an emotion, it is more about a recognition ...
and burial in the catacombs. However the novel followed the understanding of contemporary historians and greatly exaggerated the role the catacombs played in Early Christian life.van der Meer, F., ''Early Christian Art'', 1967, Faber and Faber, pp. 18–19
A
film version
A film adaptation is the transfer of a work or story, in whole or in part, to a feature film. Although often considered a type of derivative work, film adaptation has been conceptualized recently by academic scholars such as Robert Stam as a dia ...
was produced in 1918 in Italy directed by Enrico Guazzoni. Also, a lavish Franco-Italian film version was released in 1949. (It reached the USA only in 1951 in a dubbed and drastically cut version.) The second film bears little resemblance to its ostensible source. A third "peplum" film version called '' La Rivolta degli schiavi'' was produced in 1960. It takes more elements from the novel than the second, such as including both St. Agnes and St. Sebastian, but strays from the novel in many ways.
References
External links
Download book * {{librivox book , title=Fabiola , author=Cardinal Nicholas Patrick WISEMAN Fabiola Public domain version of the book at
Google Books
Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google Inc. that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical c ...