Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Tunis to close down all the Catholic churches in the country, forced the Holy See to accept an agreement of the type known as a modus vivendi, a term that literally means "a way of living". This particular agreement was unofficially described as instead a "modus non moriendi" ("a way of not dying"). By it, all but 5 of the country's more than 70 churches were handed over to the state, including what had been the cathedral of the archdiocese, while the state, for its part, promised that the buildings would be put only to use of public interest consonant with
Modus (medieval music) notation system of mensural notation (after c.1300), and in the century or so preceding the invention of that system, the term "modus" was used to describe a part of the overall metric organisation of a piece, comparable not to a modern time signature, but rather to what is sometimes called hypermeter—organization of measures into regular groups of twos or threes. It referred to the division of the note called a "longa" into either three ("modus perfectus") or two ("modus imperfectus") "breves", for which reason it is called "modus longarum". Similar divisions on subsequently lower levels were described by the terms