SANT'AGATA DEI GOTI, DIOCESE OF
Sant'Agata dei Goti is a city and diocese in the province of Benevento. It covers an area of 50 km² with a population of 38,000, all Catholic; it has 31 parishes served by 47 diocesan priests, a diocesan seminary, 47 male religious communities and 4 female ones (Ann. Pont. 1952, p. 362). It is a suffragan of Benevento.
The present-day Sant'Agata dei Goti, according to some, probably stands on the ruins of Saticula, which was a theatre of war during the struggles between the Romans and Samnites in the 4th century BC, and later became a Roman colony and loyal city; according to others, less probably, it would stand where the other Samnite city Plistia was. In the 5th century AD, after a defeat, a colony of Goths settled there, from whom the city takes its name; in the 8th century it passed to the Lombards and in the 11th to the Normans; Pope Gregory IX had it loyal in 1230; subsequently it became the possession of various comital families of the Kingdom of Sicily.
The first bishop of whom there is certain record is a certain Madelfrido (970), elected and consecrated by Ladinuflo, metropolitan of Benevento, who, in the bull of appointment of Madelfrido still preserved today, states that he wished to reconstitute the diocese of Sant'Agata because it had always had its own bishop: *ut olim semper episcopum habituum*. Historically, therefore, the beginning of the episcopal series of Sant'Agata must be placed at a date prior to the 10th century, but the data are lacking to establish the starting point. 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, who later became pope under the name of Sixtus V; St. Alphonsus de' Liguori, Doctor of the Church (1762–75). Of the medieval city there remain the walls, the castle, and the churches of St. Menna, consecrated by Pope Paschal II in 1114, and of St. Francis from 1267. The Cathedral, dedicated to the Assumption, belongs to the 10th–12th centuries, but was transformed and enlarged in the 18th.
In 1849 the diocese, following the transfer of Bishop Iavarone, lost the communes of Arienzo (where the episcopal palace still stands, inhabited by St. Alphonsus), Cervino, Santa Maria a Vico and San Felice, which were aggregated to the nearby diocese of Acerra.