Saint Cyprian

Bishop and Martyr

Feast Day

September 16

Life

200–258

Born

Carthage (now in Tunisia)

Thascius Caecilius Cyprianus was born about 200 of a wealthy pagan family at Carthage in Roman North Africa. A celebrated rhetorician, he was converted in middle age, sold his estates for the poor and was ordained priest. About 249 he was elected bishop of Carthage. The Decian persecution drove him into hiding, from which he governed his church by letter, an episode his enemies later cast as cowardice.

His correspondence with Pope Saint Cornelius shaped the Latin theology of the Church. Two of his treatises, On the Unity of the Catholic Church and On the Lapsed, became foundational. He summed his doctrine in two famous sayings: He cannot have God for his Father who has not the Church for his Mother, and Outside the Church there is no salvation (extra Ecclesiam nulla salus). Against the Novatianists he upheld the readmission of penitent apostates; against later Roman policy he insisted on the rebaptism of those baptized by heretics, a discipline the Church did not retain.

Under the renewed persecution of Valerian he was exiled in 257, then summoned back, examined by the proconsul Galerius Maximus, and beheaded in his own garden at Carthage on 14 September 258, becoming the first African bishop-martyr. His acta, the Acta Proconsularia Sancti Cypriani, are an undisputed primary record. He is named with Cornelius in the Roman Canon. His memorial was united with Cornelius's on 16 September after the calendar reform.