SANT'AGATA DEI GOTI, DIOCESE of. — City and diocese in the province of Benevento. It has an area of 50 sq. km and a population of 38,000 inhabitants, all Catholics; it has 31 parishes served by 47 diocesan priests; it has a diocesan seminary, 47 male and 4 female religious communities (Ann. Pont. 1952, p. 362). It is suffragan to Benevento.
The present S. A. dei G., according to some, probably arose on the ruins of Saticula, which was a theatre of war during the struggles between the Romans and Samnites in the fourth century B.C. and eventually became a colony and a city loyal to Rome; according to others, less probably, it arose where the other Samnite city of Plistia stood. In the fifth century A.D., after a defeat, a colony of Goths settled there, to whom the city also owes its name; in the eighth century it passed to the Lombards and in the eleventh to the Normans; Pope Gregory IX found it loyal in 1230; later it became the possession of various comital families of the Kingdom of Sicily.
The first bishop of whom there is certain knowledge was a man named Madelfrido (970), elected and consecrated by Ladinullo, metropolitan of Benevento, who, in the bull appointing Madelfrido, still preserved today, states that he wished to reconstitute the diocese of S. A. because it had always had its own bishop: ut olim semper episcopum habituram. Historically, therefore, the beginning of the episcopal succession of S. A. must be placed at a date before the tenth century, but the evidence needed to establish its starting point is lacking. Among the bishops who distinguished the see of Sant'Agata were: Giovanni Beroaldo (d. 1566), who took part in the Council of Trent; Felice Peretti, later pope under the name of Sisto V; and s. Alfonso de' Liguori, Doctor of the Church (1762–75). The walls, castle, and churches of S. Menna, consecrated by Pope Paschal II in 1114, and of S. Francesco, dating from 1267, still remain from the medieval city. The Cathedral, dedicated to the Assumption, belongs to the tenth–twelfth centuries, but was transformed and given a Baroque embellishment in the eighteenth century.
In 1849 the diocese, following the transfer of Msgr. Iavarone, lost the municipalities of Arienzo (where the episcopal palace inhabited by s. Alfonso still stands), Cervino, S. Maria a Vico, and S. Felice, which were incorporated into the nearby diocese of Acerra.