Fabiola or The Church of the Catacombs: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Fabiola or The Church of the Catacombs, credited to Cardinal Nicholas Patrick Wiseman, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of FABIOLA OR THE CHURCH OF THE CATACOMBS, by CARDINAL NICHOLAS PATRICK WISEMAN. Read by Maria Therese. This historical novel is set in Rome in the early 4th century AD, during the time of the cruel persecution of Christians under the Emperor Diocletian The heroine of the book is Fabiola, a young pagan beauty from a noble Roman family. 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. Woven into this fictitious story are a number of martyrdom accounts of real-life Christian saints, including Saint Agnes, Saint Tarcisius and Saint Sebastian. Cardinal Wiseman wrote Fabiola in part as an answer to the vigorously anti-Catholic book Hypatia by Charles Kingsley. The novel was mainly aimed at the embattled Catholic minority in England, who had recently emerged from a half-illegal status. (Summary adapted from Wikipedia)

Recording facts

• Recording title: Fabiola or The Church of the Catacombs
• Author credits: Cardinal Nicholas Patrick Wiseman
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 57
• Listed recording duration: 13:29:26

Catalogue topics

• fiction
• martryrs
• Christian
• Catholic
• persecution

Opening tracks: first 24 of 57

1. 00 - Preface — 9:02
2. 01 - The Christian House — 8:07
3. 02 - The Martyr's Boy — 10:40
4. 03 - The Dedication — 10:20
5. 04 - The Heathen Household — 17:00
6. 05 - The Visit — 9:25
7. 06 - The Banquet — 13:38
8. 07 - Poor and Rich — 18:20
9. 08 - The First Day's Conclusion — 9:12
10. 09 - Meetings — 22:11
11. 10 - Other Meetings — 21:15
12. 11 - A Talk With the Reader — 12:21
13. 12 - The Wolf and the Fox — 8:31
14. 13 - Charity — 6:28
15. 14 - Extremes Meet — 17:07
16. 15 - Charity Returns — 5:04
17. 16 - The Month of October — 26:26
18. 17 - The Christian Community — 22:22
19. 18 - Temptation — 9:50
20. 19 - The Fall — 21:56
21. 20 - Diogenes — 17:30
22. 21 - The Cemeteries — 16:36
23. 22 - What Diogenes Could Not Tell About the Catacombs — 12:44
24. 23 - What Diogenes Did Tell About the Catacombs — 13:35

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Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.