The Pact of the Catacombs

In 2015 the Catholic Church is celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second Vatican Council, a council that was a landmark in the two thousand years of the Church's history. At the end of the Council, inspired by what was being done and said in the Council hall, some forty bishops from various countries of the world met in the Catacombs of Domitilla to sign what is today known as The Pact of the Catacombs, a text and programme that sets out the mission of the poor in the Church. The spirit of the Pact of the Catacombs has guided some of the best Christian initiatives of the last fifty years, not only in Latin America, where it had particular impact, but throughout the Catholic Church, so that its witness (its inspiration and its text) have become one of the most influential and important signs of twentieth-century Catholicism.