You probably don't realize it, but a lot of words we use in every-day speech have Roman Catholic origins. Some examples:

CHAPEL

Meaning: A private church.

Background: When Saint Martin of Tours died in the fourth century, his admirers kept his cape - called a capella in Latin - and built a shrine for it. The French named the shrine the chapelle, and when the English borrowed the word, they dropped the "le" and applied the word to any small place of worship ... whether or not it had a cape in it.

Note: The person assigned to guard Saint Martin's cape was known as the capellanus ... which is the direct precursor of the English word "chaplain."

BONFIRE

Meaning: A large fire "specially built and lit to express public joy."

Background: A gruesome throwback to the reign of England's King Henry VIII, who had large fires specially built and lit to burn Catholics who refused to renounce the pope and accept him as the leader of the English church. Originally spelled bonefire, the word gets its name from the fact that surviving Catholics plucked the bones of the dearly departed out of the ashes and preserved them as relics.

DECIMATE

Meaning: Today "decimate" means to destroy or kill a large part of something, but in the old days it was much more precise: It meant to kill every tenth person ... and has the same root as "decimal" and "December."

Background: Decimation was the means by which the Roman military dealt with mutinous troops: It literally held a death lottery in which it killed one tenth of the rebellious soldiers by selecting names at random. One famous example was that of Saint Maurice and six hundred of his troops in approximately 287 A.D. When they refused to make sacrifices to pagan gods, one tenth of the soldiers were slaughtered. But they still refused to sacrifice, so another tenth were killed, and so on until everyone was dead - with Saint Maurice being the very last person martyred.

CEMETERY

Meaning: A place where the dead are buried.

Background: The word comes from koimeterion, the Greek word for "sleeping place." The early Christians were the first people to call graveyards cemeteries - they believed the bodies of the dead would be reunited with their souls on Judgment Day, which meant the corpse's placement in the cemetery was only temporary.

CATACOMB

Meaning: An underground burial vault.

Background: Yet another Catholic death innovation. The name came about by coincidence, thanks to the location of one of the early Christian grave sites on the Via Appia outside of Rome: It was kata kumbas - "near the low place" - between two hills.