Christians and the Roman Colosseum

1. The Short Answer to the Question

Were Christians martyred in the Colosseum? Probably yes, and no surviving ancient source says so of any named person. Roman courts sent condemned people to die by beasts and by fire in the arena, the Colosseum was the arena of the city of Rome from the year 80 until the sixth century, and Christians were tried and executed in Rome throughout that stretch. What nobody has is a text, an inscription or an excavated object that puts one identifiable Christian death inside that particular building.

Those two sentences are the whole honest answer, and most of what you will read online sits on one side of them. Devotional writing tends to describe the arena floor as soaked in the blood of thousands of Christians, which the sources do not support. Debunking articles tend to answer with a flat no, as though the absence of a document settles a question about a city where the trial records of ordinary criminal cases have almost entirely perished. The evidence sustains a strong probability and refuses to sustain a list of names.

That is an uncomfortable place to stand, and it is where the historical record puts a careful reader. This guide walks through the building, the law, the sources that survive, the sources that do not, the specific cases people cite, the reasons the early Roman church left the amphitheatre alone for a thousand years, and the reasons a pope eventually planted a cross in the middle of it.

2. What Was Built on the Site, and When

The building Romans called the Flavian Amphitheatre was begun under the emperor Vespasian around AD 72 and inaugurated by his son Titus in AD 80, with a further storey added under Domitian. It went up on drained ground that had held an ornamental lake in Nero's Golden House, which was a deliberate political act: the Flavian emperors were giving back to the Roman people a piece of land the last of the Julio-Claudians had taken for a private pleasure garden.

A reconstructed dedicatory inscription indicates the funding source. In 1995 the historian Geza Alfoeldy read the dowel holes of a re-used inscription block at the site as an earlier text stating that the emperor Vespasian ordered the new amphitheatre to be built ex manubiis, from the spoils of war. The spoils in question are those of the Jewish War and the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in AD 70. If that reading holds, the building the Church now prays in was financed by the sack of Jerusalem.

The reconstruction of the dedicatory inscription was published by Geza Alfoeldy in the journal Zeitschrift fuer Papyrologie und Epigraphik in 1995 and is widely accepted, though it remains a reconstruction from dowel holes rather than surviving lettering.

How Big, and How Many People

The fourth-century regionary catalogues of the city of Rome credit the amphitheatre with 87,000 loca, a word meaning places or seat-slots rather than ticketed seats. Modern archaeologists working from the surviving structure generally put the real spectator capacity closer to 50,000. Both figures are estimates, and the gap between them is a useful warning about ancient numbers in general.

The figure of 87,000 loca comes from the late Roman regionary catalogues, administrative lists of the buildings of the fourteen districts of Rome. The lower modern estimates come from archaeological study of the seating tiers and entrances. Neither figure is a headcount.

The inauguration under Titus is described by Suetonius in his life of that emperor and by Cassius Dio in his Roman history, both of whom report games running about a hundred days, with beast hunts on an enormous scale and a flooded arena used for a mock naval battle. Below the arena floor, added under Domitian, ran the hypogeum: two levels of brick corridors, animal cages, lifts and trapdoors, so that beasts and scenery could appear from underneath. The machinery is the part of the building that tells you most about its purpose.

Where the Name Came From

Romans called it the amphitheatrum Flavium. The name Colosseum is medieval and comes from the Colossus, a bronze statue of enormous height that Nero had made of himself and that was later reworked as an image of the sun god and moved to stand near the amphitheatre. The building took its nickname from its neighbour. A famous saying, preserved in a medieval collection attributed to Bede, runs that while the Colosseum stands Rome stands, when the Colosseum falls Rome will fall, and when Rome falls the world will fall. The attribution is doubtful and the couplet is later than Bede, and it is quoted here as a piece of medieval sentiment rather than as evidence for anything.

3. What Actually Happened Inside the Arena

A full day of games ran in three parts, and knowing the order matters for the martyr question. Beast hunts, the venationes, came in the morning: trained hunters against imported animals, and animals against each other. Public executions came at midday, in the gap when much of the crowd went out to eat. Gladiatorial combat, the expensive part, came in the afternoon.

The midday slot is where a condemned Christian would have died. Executions in that hour were not contests. The condemned were unarmed, and the point was the death itself, staged for a public that had come to watch justice done to people the law had placed outside its protection. Seneca describes this hour in the seventh of his moral letters, saying that he went to the games expecting some amusement and found pure butchery, that in the morning men are thrown to lions and bears and at midday to their spectators, and that the crowd calls for one killer to be thrown to the next.

Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius 7. Seneca died in AD 65, fifteen years before the Colosseum was inaugurated, so the letter describes amphitheatre games in general and not this building. It is quoted here as evidence for what the midday hour was, not for what happened at the Flavian Amphitheatre.

The Forms an Arena Execution Took

Roman practice had several. Damnatio ad bestias exposed the condemned to animals, usually bound or driven out unprotected. Crematio burned them alive. Some were forced to fight untrained, killing each other in sequence until one remained, and that one was killed. A grim refinement staged executions as mythological scenes, so that a condemned man burned to death was dressed as Hercules on his pyre. The poet Martial describes such stagings at the amphitheatre in his book on the spectacles, written for the inauguration under Titus.

That catalogue was the standard treatment of slaves, deserters, brigands, and the free poor convicted of serious crime, and it was in place long before there were Christians to apply it to. Christians entered the system through the ordinary door, condemned as members of a class the law already treated this way.

4. How Roman Law Put a Christian in the Arena

Roman criminal law sorted the population into two grades for the purposes of punishment. The honestiores, the respectable classes, were normally executed by the sword or exiled. The humiliores, everyone else, were liable to the summa supplicia: crucifixion, burning and exposure to beasts. Punishment tracked social rank rather than the offence. Paul is beheaded and Peter, by the Roman tradition, is crucified, and that difference is exactly what Roman citizenship did for a condemned man.

Christians were not proscribed by a standing law for most of the first two centuries. The mechanism visible in the sources is local and reactive. The correspondence between Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia, and the emperor Trajan around AD 112 lays out the practice: Pliny asks what to do with people denounced as Christians, executes those who persist after three interrogations, sends citizens to Rome, and Trajan replies that Christians are not to be sought out, that anonymous accusations are to be ignored, and that anyone who denies the charge and worships the Roman gods is to be pardoned.

Pliny the Younger, Letters 10.96 and 10.97. The exchange is the earliest detailed non-Christian description of Roman procedure against Christians and of Christian worship.

Two things follow for the Colosseum question. First, the number of Christians executed in any given decade was small compared with the totals devotional writing has often assumed, because prosecution was sporadic and depended on accusers. Second, when a Christian of low status was condemned in Rome in the second, third or early fourth century, the punishment available to the magistrate included the arena, and the arena in Rome meant, most of the time, this building.

The Empire-Wide Persecutions

Three later episodes were general rather than local. The edict of Decius in 249 and 250 required a universal sacrifice with certificates issued to those who complied, and thousands of those certificates survive from Egypt. Valerian's edicts of 257 and 258 targeted clergy and property and produced the deaths of Pope Sixtus II and the deacon Lawrence in Rome. The persecution begun under Diocletian in 303 was the longest and most severe, and it ended in the west with the toleration granted after 312 and the settlement associated with Constantine and Licinius. Rome had condemned Christians in all three, and Rome had a working amphitheatre in all three.

The Church has always treated these deaths as the highest form of witness. The Catechism calls martyrdom the supreme witness given to the truth of the faith, and says it means bearing witness even unto death (CCC 2473). It adds that the Church has painstakingly collected the records of those who persevered to the end in witnessing to their faith, the acts of the martyrs (CCC 2474). That second sentence is worth pausing on, because collecting the records is what the Church did and did not do at the Colosseum, and the difference is the subject of section nine below.

5. Nero's Persecution Happened Before the Colosseum Existed

The single most common error in popular accounts is placing Nero's killing of Christians in the Colosseum. The dates make it impossible. The great fire of Rome fell in AD 64, the persecution that followed came immediately after, and construction of the amphitheatre did not begin until around 72, with the inauguration in 80. Whatever happened to the Christians of Rome under Nero happened somewhere else.

Tacitus gives the account, writing about fifty years later. He reports that Nero, to kill the rumour that he had ordered the fire, fastened the guilt on a group the crowd called Christians, that their founder Christus had been executed under Tiberius by the procurator Pontius Pilate, that a great multitude was convicted, and that they were killed with mockery: covered in the skins of beasts and torn by dogs, crucified, and set alight to serve as lamps when daylight failed. He adds that Nero offered his own gardens for the display and mingled with the crowd at a circus show.

Tacitus, Annals 15.44. The passage is the earliest surviving non-Christian reference to the execution of Jesus and to Christians in Rome. Tacitus locates the killings in Nero's gardens and at a circus, not at an amphitheatre.

Roman tradition places the death of Peter on the Vatican hill, near the circus of Gaius and Nero, and burial in the cemetery on that slope, which is why St Peter's Basilica stands over that spot and not somewhere more convenient. Paul, as a citizen, is beheaded, and the tradition places his grave on the road to Ostia under the basilica of St Paul Outside the Walls. Around the year 200 a Roman presbyter named Gaius, quoted by Eusebius in his Ecclesiastical History 2.25, said he could point to the trophies of the two apostles on the Vatican and on the Ostian road. Neither location is the Colosseum, and neither ever was. Our guides to Peter, the rock and first pope and Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles follow both stories to the end.

6. Ignatius of Antioch and the Strongest Case

Ignatius, bishop of Antioch in Syria, is the best case anyone has for a Christian death in the Colosseum, and even his case does not name the building. Condemned in his own city and sent to Rome under military guard, he wrote seven letters on the journey, one of them to the Christians of Rome, begging them not to use their influence to save him. The letter is the reason he is remembered here.

He writes that he is God's wheat, and that he is to be ground by the teeth of wild beasts so that he may be found the pure bread of Christ. He asks the Roman Christians to coax the beasts to become his tomb. He says he will even provoke them if they hold back. The language is extreme and it is his own, and it tells us what he expected: death by animals, in Rome, in a public arena.

Eusebius, writing in the early fourth century, reports in his Ecclesiastical History 3.36 that Ignatius was taken from Syria to Rome and given to wild beasts on account of his witness to Christ. That is a source roughly two centuries after the event, and it says Rome and beasts, and nothing about the amphitheatre.

What the Later Acts Add, and Why to Discount Them

Several accounts of Ignatius' martyrdom survive that do name the amphitheatre and supply a date and a crowd. They are later compositions, and specialists generally regard them as pious expansions built out of the letters rather than independent testimony. Using them to place Ignatius in the Colosseum is circular: they say what a later reader assumed, and they are the only reason later readers assume it.

The chronology also carries a footnote. Ignatius is traditionally dated to the reign of Trajan, roughly AD 107 to 110, on the strength of Eusebius. Some scholars have argued for a later date, well into the second century, on the grounds of the letters' theological vocabulary and church order. Either dating puts him after AD 80, so either way the Colosseum was standing and functioning when he arrived. What remains missing is a writer who says he went into it.

The best formulation of the Ignatius case is therefore this. A bishop was sent to Rome to die by beasts at a time when Rome's beast venue was overwhelmingly the Flavian Amphitheatre, and no ancient text closes the last step. The inference is reasonable, it is not documentation, and it should be offered to a sceptical friend in exactly those terms.

7. Arena Martyrdoms That Are Documented

Christians were certainly killed in Roman amphitheatres, and the accounts that prove it come from provincial cities rather than from Rome. Reading them is the fastest way to see that the practice was real and the Roman gap is a gap in the paperwork.

Lyon, AD 177

A letter from the churches of Lyons and Vienne to the churches of Asia and Phrygia, preserved by Eusebius in his Ecclesiastical History 5.1, describes a pogrom in the Rhone valley that ended in the local amphitheatre. It names the deacon Sanctus, the newly baptised Maturus, a slave woman named Blandina and a boy named Ponticus, and it describes them being exposed to beasts, seated in an iron chair heated until it burned, and finally killed. Blandina, the letter says, was hung on a stake as food for the beasts, and the others took courage from the sight of her. The document is contemporary, circumstantial and written by people in the city.

Carthage, AD 203

The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity records the deaths of a young Roman matron and a pregnant slave woman in the amphitheatre at Carthage during a birthday spectacle for the emperor's son. Part of the text is presented as Perpetua's own prison diary, which would make it one of the earliest surviving pieces of writing by a Christian woman. They were exposed to a wild cow and then finished by the sword. This site covers that story in full in the guide to Perpetua and Felicity, which is about Carthage and makes no claim about Rome.

Smyrna, mid Second Century

The Martyrdom of Polycarp describes the death of the aged bishop of Smyrna in the city stadium. The crowd calls for a lion, the official in charge replies that the beast shows are over, and Polycarp is burned instead and then stabbed. The detail is the kind of thing invention does not produce, and the text is usually dated within a generation of the event.

Set the table out that way and the shape of the problem is clear. The practice is documented, the venue is documented in three provincial cities, and the one place everybody pictures is the one place the sources do not name. Rome's ordinary court records have not survived, and Rome's Christian records concentrate on graves rather than on courtrooms, which is the subject of section nine.

8. The Colosseum Was Not Rome's Only Killing Ground

Rome had several places where a public execution could be staged, and treating the Colosseum as the default venue skips a real complication. Beast hunts were held in the Circus Maximus long before the amphitheatre existed and continued to be held there afterwards. The circus of Gaius and Nero on the Vatican hill is where Roman tradition puts the death of Peter. A smaller amphitheatre, the Amphitheatrum Castrense, stood on the south-eastern edge of the city near the imperial residence whose grounds later held the basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme.

Executions also happened outside any entertainment venue at all. Beheading was carried out on the roads leading out of the city, which is why the martyr traditions of Rome are scattered along the consular highways and why the shrines and catacombs sit where they sit. The Roman tradition of Paul's death names a spot on the Ostian Way. The tradition of Lawrence names a place associated with fire and a gridiron rather than an arena.

What This Does to the Odds

It lowers them without removing them. A Christian condemned in Rome between AD 80 and the early fourth century might have died by the sword outside the walls, in the Circus Maximus, in the smaller amphitheatre, or in the Colosseum. Of those options the Colosseum was the largest and the one where the state staged its biggest displays, so it remains the most likely single venue for anyone sentenced to beasts. That is a statement about probability, and it is as far as the evidence goes.

The wider layout of Christian Rome, the four papal basilicas, the catacombs and the relic churches, is set out in our guide to Rome pilgrimage sites and how the city is arranged for a pilgrim. The martyr shrines it describes are almost all built over graves, and that fact is about to become the most important piece of evidence on this page.

9. The Silence of the Early Roman Church

The most serious argument against a Colosseum martyr cult is that the Christians of Rome did not have one for about a thousand years. Roman Christianity was intensely interested in the physical remains of its martyrs, and it built its whole devotional geography around graves. If the community had believed that a named martyr died in the amphitheatre, we would expect to see that belief in the documents that record what Roman Christians venerated. We do not.

The Depositio Martyrum

A Roman calendar compiled in the year 354, part of a larger illustrated almanac usually called the Chronograph of 354, contains a list called the Depositio martyrum. It records martyrs by the date of their commemoration and by the cemetery where they lie. It is a list of graves and anniversaries. It is not a list of execution sites, and it does not point anyone toward the amphitheatre.

The Depositio martyrum is preserved in the Chronograph of 354, a Roman almanac compiled for a wealthy Christian named Valentinus. It is the earliest surviving Roman list of martyr commemorations.

The Seventh-Century Pilgrim Itineraries

Several guides survive that were written to route pilgrims around the shrines of Rome in the seventh century, among them the Notitia ecclesiarum urbis Romae and a text usually called De locis sanctis martyrum. They take the reader out along the Via Appia, the Via Ostiense, the Via Nomentana and the rest, naming catacombs and the martyrs buried in each. The Colosseum is not on the circuit. A pilgrim following those directions walked past the amphitheatre without being told to stop.

The same silence shows in what was built. Roman Christians marked martyr sites with basilicas, small memorial chapels and altars over graves, and they did it early and repeatedly. Nothing of that kind went up at the amphitheatre in late antiquity. The building continued to host games well after the empire became officially Christian, which by itself proves that fourth-century and fifth-century Roman Christians did not regard the arena as consecrated ground.

How Much This Proves

Less than a debunking article usually claims. Roman devotion followed relics, and an arena death frequently left nothing to bury: bodies were dragged out through the gate of the dead, and in the Lyons account the remains were burned and the ashes thrown into the Rhone precisely so that no shrine could grow. A cult of place needs a body, and the arena was designed to make bodies disappear. The silence tells us the early Roman church did not venerate the amphitheatre. It does not tell us nobody died there for Christ.

10. Telemachus and the End of the Games

One story ties a Christian death to a Roman arena in a Christian source, and it is worth handling carefully because it is often told as fact and is often told wrongly. Theodoret of Cyrus, a bishop and historian writing in the mid fifth century, records in his Ecclesiastical History 5.26 that a monk named Telemachus came from the east to Rome, went down into the arena during a gladiatorial show to separate the fighters, and was killed by the spectators for spoiling their entertainment. Theodoret says the emperor Honorius enrolled him among the martyrs and put an end to the shows.

Several things about that account are shaky. Theodoret writes decades after the event, from Syria, and he is the only source. He does not name the amphitheatre. The Roman Martyrology commemorates a martyr called Almachius on 1 January and the two names are usually treated as the same figure, which introduces a second strand of tradition with its own uncertainties. Historians of late Roman spectacle generally hold that gladiatorial combat was already in long decline for reasons of cost and imperial policy, and that no single decree ended it.

When the Killing Actually Stopped

Gladiatorial combat disappears from the Roman record in the first half of the fifth century. Beast hunts outlived it by a century. A letter of Cassiodorus in his Variae collection discusses beast shows given at Rome in the 520s under Ostrogothic rule, and the last venatio in the amphitheatre is generally placed in 523. After that the building slid out of use for spectacle entirely.

Cassiodorus, Variae 5.42, addressed to the consul Maximus, is the usual basis for dating the final recorded beast show at Rome to 523. The date is an inference from that letter rather than a statement in it.

The honest way to tell the Telemachus story is as Theodoret tells it, with his name attached, with the note that he is the only witness, and without the cinematic addition that the emperor abolished the games on the spot in response. What survives is a fifth-century bishop's account of a monk who thought a Christian empire should not be watching men kill each other, and who was killed for saying so out loud in the wrong place.

11. Fortress, Quarry, Garden: the Medieval Colosseum

The Colosseum spent most of the Middle Ages as a piece of industrial and residential real estate. Once the games stopped, the building was repurposed the way any large empty structure is. Workshops and housing occupied the arcades. A church stood inside the complex at various points. The Frangipani, a Roman baronial family, fortified it and held it as a stronghold, and other families disputed it with them.

Then came the earthquakes. A severe shock in 1349 brought down a long stretch of the outer wall on the southern side, which is why the building today shows a complete outer ring on one side and a lower broken profile on the other. The fallen travertine became a quarry. Blocks from the Colosseum went into palaces, churches and bridges across Rome for centuries, and the pockmarks visible all over the surviving stonework are the holes left where iron clamps were prised out for the metal.

Passion Plays in the Arena

Religious use arrived from an unexpected direction. From the later Middle Ages a Roman confraternity used the arena as a setting for Passion plays, staging the death of Christ in the building where Romans had staged deaths for entertainment. The irony was surely part of the appeal. Those performances are the first sustained Christian claim on the site, and they came about thirteen centuries after the games it had been built for.

A story often repeated in later devotional writing holds that a sixteenth-century pope directed pilgrims to gather sand from the arena as a relic, on the grounds that it was soaked with the blood of martyrs. No early source supports the underlying claim about the sand, and the story is best treated as evidence for what sixteenth-century Romans had come to believe about the building rather than as evidence about the second century. Something similar is true of the martyr numbers that circulate: figures in the thousands for Colosseum deaths have no ancient basis and are not repeated here.

The Wild Garden

The ruin also became one of the strangest botanical sites in Europe. Seeds arrived over the centuries in animal fodder, on visitors, and on the wind, and the broken masonry held soil in a thousand pockets at different heights and exposures. In 1855 the botanist Richard Deakin published Flora of the Colosseum of Rome, cataloguing 420 species growing on the monument. The plants were stripped out later in the nineteenth century to protect the stonework, and Deakin's book is now the record of a habitat that no longer exists.

Richard Deakin, Flora of the Colosseum of Rome (London, 1855). The count of 420 species is Deakin's own.

12. Why the Church Consecrated the Arena

The decisive moment came in the middle of the eighteenth century, when quarrying was still eating the building and Rome was preparing for the Holy Year of 1750. Benedict XIV, pope from 1740 to 1758, is credited with dedicating the Colosseum to the Passion of Christ and to the memory of the martyrs, which had the practical effect of stopping the removal of stone. The Franciscan preacher Leonard of Port Maurice, the great promoter of the Way of the Cross in that generation, set up Stations of the Cross around the arena, and a large cross was raised in the centre.

The legal shape of that act has been argued about ever since. No formal consecration decree of the kind a church receives appears to survive, and in the nineteenth century Roman archaeologists disputed whether the building had ever been consecrated in the strict canonical sense, a question with practical consequences when the state wanted to excavate. What is certain is the public fact: from around 1750 the Colosseum was treated as a place of Christian prayer, and it has been treated that way since.

The dedication is usually dated to the preparations for the Holy Year of 1750 under Benedict XIV. The strict canonical status of the act was disputed by nineteenth-century Roman antiquarians. The stations and the arena cross were removed in the 1870s when the new Italian state excavated the hypogeum, and a cross was later returned to the arena, where it stands on the north side today.

What the Church Was and Was Not Claiming

Benedict XIV was doing what the Church does with places of mass killing: taking a site built for death as entertainment and turning it into a place where the death of Christ is remembered. The act carried no historical finding that named martyrs died on that floor. The dedication honours the martyrs of Rome as a body, wherever in the city they died, and it holds a building that had been a quarry for four hundred years.

That distinction is worth defending, because it is also the answer to the sceptic. A Catholic can concede every historical point on this page and lose nothing. The cross in the arena rests on three plain facts: Rome killed people there for sport for four centuries, Rome killed Christians for their faith during those same centuries, and the Church claims the memory of both. A documented martyrdom inside the walls was never what held it up.

The stations Leonard of Port Maurice erected are the same devotion Christians walk in Jerusalem, and our guide to the Via Dolorosa and the stations of the cross traces where that route came from and how the fourteen stations settled into their present form.

13. The Good Friday Way of the Cross

On the night of Good Friday the pope leads the Way of the Cross at the Colosseum, and the ceremony is now the best-known Christian use of the building. Torches, a wooden cross carried between stations by people chosen for the occasion, a text of meditations read aloud, and a crowd standing in the dark outside the arcades. The modern papal celebration on that site dates from Paul VI in 1964, and every pope since has led it or attended it.

The meditations are commissioned fresh most years, and the choice of author is itself a statement. In 2005 the texts were written by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, weeks before he was elected as Benedict XVI, and his ninth station spoke about filth in the Church, a line quoted around the world at a moment when the Church was reckoning with the abuse scandals. In other years the meditations have been written by prisoners, by families, by young people, by refugees and by people who nurse the dying.

The Good Friday of 2005

Good Friday that year fell on 25 March. John Paul II was too ill to travel the short distance to the Colosseum, and he followed the stations from the chapel of his apartment, seen from behind on the television feed, holding a crucifix against his chest. He died on 2 April, eight days later. For a pope who had made the Via Crucis at the arena a fixed point of his pontificate, it was a legible ending.

The rite was moved to St Peter's Square in 2020 and again the following year when public gatherings were restricted during the pandemic, and it returned to the Colosseum afterwards. That interruption made the point about the venue: the stations can be prayed anywhere, and the Colosseum is chosen because of what the building is.

Why That Building for That Devotion

The Way of the Cross follows a condemned man through a public execution carried out by the Roman state, watched by a crowd, outside the walls of a city, on a charge that mixed religion and politics. The Colosseum is the largest surviving structure the same state built to hold crowds watching condemned people die. Praying the one inside the other is an argument made with a place rather than with words, and it is the reason the ceremony has never moved permanently to a more comfortable location.

14. The Colosseum and the Death Penalty Today

The Colosseum is used as a public sign in the campaign against capital punishment. The city of Rome has lit the monument to mark abolitions, commutations and moratoria on death sentences, an initiative connected with the Community of Sant'Egidio and its Cities for Life campaign, which is observed on 30 November, the anniversary of the first abolition of the death penalty in a European state, in Tuscany in 1786.

The logic is direct. A building erected for state killing as public spectacle is lit up whenever a modern state stops killing. Whatever the second-century history turns out to be, that use of the site is a real argument and it is legible to people who have no interest in the martyrs.

Where Catholic Teaching Stands

The Catholic position on capital punishment has developed. The Catechism was revised in 2018 so that paragraph 2267 now teaches that the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person, and commits the Church to work for its abolition worldwide. Earlier formulations had permitted recourse to it where it was the only practicable way of defending lives, and had already judged such cases to be very rare or practically non-existent. Our guide to the death penalty in Catholic teaching traces that development and the arguments on each side.

The martyr connection is not decoration here. The Christian objection to the arena was never that the wrong people were being killed in it. Christian writers of the second and third centuries objected to the spectacle as such, to the appetite it fed and to the treating of a human death as an entertainment. Standing at the Colosseum with that in view puts the visitor on the side of the argument the martyrs were making.

15. How to Pray at the Colosseum

The Colosseum is a working archaeological site with heavy visitor traffic, and prayer there takes some deliberateness. The arena is loud, the queues are long, and the building is presented to most visitors as engineering and entertainment history. A pilgrim who wants it to be more than that has to bring the more with them.

Four Things Worth Doing

Find the cross and stop there. A cross stands on the north side of the arena with an inscription. It is the point of the visit for a Christian, and it takes about thirty seconds to walk past it. Stand there long enough to pray for the martyrs of Rome and for Christians under pressure now, which is a live category and not a historical one.

Pray one station rather than fourteen. A full Way of the Cross is difficult in the visitor flow. One station, prayed slowly, in the place where the Good Friday rite is held, does the work. Bring the text with you.

Read Ignatius before you arrive. His letter to the Romans is short and can be read in fifteen minutes. Having his sentences in your head while standing at the arena wall is the difference between a monument and a place, and it is honest, because his is the strongest case anyone has for a Christian death inside the building.

Go on to the graves. The martyr cult of Rome lives in the catacombs on the consular roads and in the basilicas over the apostles' tombs. A day that takes in the Colosseum and then goes out to a catacomb makes an argument in the right order: the arena is where the state did its work, the cemeteries are where the Church kept its memory. Our guide to the pilgrim map of Rome lays out how to combine them, and what a pilgrimage is and why Catholics make them covers the practice itself.

What to Tell Someone Who Says It Is All a Myth

Concede the specifics and hold the substance. No ancient source names a Christian who died in the Colosseum. The thousands-of-martyrs claim has no basis. The consecration is eighteenth century and the cross is modern. Then state the rest: the empire did condemn Christians to the beasts, this was the beast venue of the capital for four centuries, Ignatius of Antioch was sent to Rome expecting exactly that death, and the Church prays here for the martyrs of Rome without pretending to a list of names. A faith that has to be defended with overstatement is being defended badly.

16. Frequently Asked Questions