Saint Callistus I
Pope and Martyr
- Feast Day
- October 14
- Life
- d. 222
- Born
- Rome
Callistus, by birth a Roman slave of Christian household, came to ecclesiastical office under Pope Saint Zephyrinus (199-217), who entrusted to him the administration of the Christian cemetery on the Via Appia, the catacomb that still bears his name and contains the tombs of nine third-century popes. On the death of Zephyrinus he was elected Bishop of Rome and reigned from 217 to 222.
His pontificate was contested by the rigorist priest Hippolytus of Rome, who reproached Callistus for laxity in admitting penitent murderers, adulterers and apostates to communion, in tolerating second marriages of clergy, and in regularizing the unions of Christian women with Christian slaves. Most of what is known of him comes from this hostile source (the Philosophumena, attributed to Hippolytus). The Catholic tradition has nonetheless vindicated the substance of his discipline as expressing the Church's authority to forgive grave sins.
Callistus's traditional cultus reaches back to the very early martyrologies, which name him a martyr; the precise circumstances of his death in 222 are disputed. He was buried not in the cemetery he had organized but in the cemetery of Calepodius on the Via Aurelia. His relics were translated in the eighth century to the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere at Rome. His Optional Memorial is observed on 14 October.
Callistus is among the early Roman pontiffs whose ministry shaped the Catholic discipline of penance and forgiveness against the rigorism of competing schools. The catacomb of Saint Callistus on the Via Appia preserves a continuous archaeological witness to early Roman Christianity and contains the Crypt of the Popes, where many of his successors were laid to rest.
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