The Conclave: A Sometimes Secret and Occasionally Bloody History of Papal Elections (3 page)

The dissident group survived through the pontificates of Urban and Pontian, but then conditions for Christians in Rome deteri- orated sharply. Though the early years of Christianity are some- times portrayed as a period of unremitting persecution, when the faithful in Rome had to flee for safety’s sake to hide among the underground tombs in the catacombs, that is a rather romantic

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vision. Such cemeteries were public places; there would have been no point in hiding in them. And, in any case, persecution was for the most part spasmodic and localized. Though Callistus may have been the victim of an anti-Christian mob, his death was not part of an o
ffi
cial persecution because Christians were tolerated in Rome at the time. However, in March 235 Maximinus Thrax became Emperor. He ordered Rome’s Christian leaders to be arrested and sent to the mines in Sardinia. Both Hippolytus and Pope Pontian were deported. Pontian resigned his position on 28 September that year, the first pope known to have abdicated, and it was possibly because of the persecution that there was a delay of almost two months before Anterus was elected to replace him.

Or it may have been that news of Pontian’s death reached Rome about that time. Although the exact date of his death is unknown, he did not survive long in Sardinia. Before his death, however, he and his erstwhile rival Hippolytus had been reconciled and both are now numbered among the saints of the Roman Church.

Anterus was promptly succeeded by Fabian, despite the persecu- tion which was still in progress, though not for much longer. He became pope on 10 January 236, and was particularly important because he divided Rome into seven ecclesiastical districts, each under the control of a deacon and his assistants. It was their task to distribute alms and generally care for the social well-being of the Christians in their regions of the city. This meant that the deacons became very well known to the people, and for several centuries it was more often than not the deacons, rather than priests, who were elected to the papacy. Eusebius, the Christian historian and Bishop of Caesarea in Palestine, died c. 340, but his history of the Church was completed in the early years of the fourth century. It is true that it was being revised, and added to, well into the 320s, but he was first writing at a time not far removed from the death of Fabian. He lived, however, at a considerable distance from Rome, and most of the narrative relates to the Eastern Church; certainly his story about the election of Fabian must be treated with

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suspicion. There was quite a number of good candidates for Rome’s bishopric, he said, and Fabian was not among them. But then the Holy Spirit came down upon Fabian in the form of a dove and everyone who saw it immediately called out that Fabian was the proper candidate.

Though most of Fabian’s pontificate was passed in times of peace for the Church, it began during the persecution of Maximinus and ended with the very much more serious, and thorough, persecution of the Emperor Decius. Like Maximinus, Decius had the leaders of the church arrested and, in Fabian’s case, executed. He died a martyr on 20 January 250. His successor was not elected until March of the following year, a delay undoubtedly caused by the persecution. In the meantime the church in Rome seems to have been run by a council, a leading member of which was a priest called Novatian. When they eventually felt able to hold an election, the candidate of choice was a certain Moses, but he died. Novatian, it seems, was expecting to be chosen but instead the choice fell on a priest named Cornelius, whom his contemporary St. Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, called “unambitious.” Novatian was furious and set up a rival community of which he became bishop: if Hippolytus wasn’t the first antipope then Novatian was. It may all have been a matter of thwarted ambition, but Novatian and his followers also claimed that Cornelius had been wrong to be so lenient to those Christians who had lapsed from their faith during the Decian persecution. The treatment of the lapsed was an issue which a
ff
ected the Church in many places other than Rome, and Novatian’s rigorism was embraced by some throughout the Christian world. But it was Cornelius’s more moderate attitude which finally prevailed, certainly in Rome and

in most places elsewhere.

The Emperor Decius was killed in battle. He was followed by Gallus, who revived the persecution. Cornelius was arrested, exiled to what is now Civitavecchia, where he died at an uncertain date but probably in June 253. Lucius was elected on 26 June and almost

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immediately sent into exile. The exile did not last long because another new emperor, Valerian, showed himself tolerant of Chris- tians. Lucius, however, survived less than a year in o
ffi
ce. It may be that he was martyred, but it is more likely he died a natural death. Eusebius in his history rather suggests that Lucius appointed Stephen to succeed him: he was consecrated, however, only after an interregnum of nearly three months which, in the absence of persecution, suggests that his succession was problematic. He was an imperious figure and fell out with Cyprian of Carthage, as well as with other communities in the Eastern Church.

Pope Sixtus, second of that name so listed as Sixtus II, was elected to succeed Stephen. There was at the time no persecution of the Church, and the election took place in the month Stephen died, August 257. But shortly afterward the Emperor Valerian went back on his earlier tolerance and renewed the attacks on Christians – as one Christian writer commented, whenever anything went wrong, if there was a plague, or the Nile failed to flood and irrigate the fields, or even if there was an eclipse of the sun, the cry went up, “Christians to the lion!” (he added sardonically, “What, all the Christians to one lion?”). Pope Sixtus II was executed when he had been in o
ffi
ce almost exactly a year. He was beheaded, along with three of his deacons, while presiding at a service in the cemetery of Praetextatus. Three more deacons were executed that same day, and the last four days later. The final one to die was Lawrence, according to tradition roasted on a gridiron because as financial secretary to the Roman Church he had refused to hand over the papal treasury.

With the death of all the deacons along with the pope in September 257 only the priests were left to run the Roman church, and they waited until their troubles were over, with the capture – by trickery – of Valerian on the Eastern front by the Persian King Sapor. That was in 260 – the exact date is unknown, as is the fate of the emperor – and Valerian’s son and successor Gallienus immediately suspended the persecution. So Dionysius was elected

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on 22 July 260, ruled for eight and a half years, and was succeeded by Felix in early January of 269. Felix was followed in turn by Eutychian and Caius. There was an unusually long delay between the death of Caius and the election of Marcellinus, seemingly well over two months. There was no persecution at the time – on the contrary, it was a period of relative prosperity for the Church – so the hesitation to appoint Marcellinus is surprising.

He became pope at the very end of June 296. In 303 the Emperor Diocletian, who thought that the protection of the ancient gods was essential to the well-being of the Empire, ordered another persecution of Christians when pagan priests blamed the presence of Christians for the failure of their oracles. Diocletian’s was to be the most thorough persecution the Church had ever known and left in its wake a host of problems, especially about what was to be done with those who had betrayed their faith by handing over the books of the Scriptures to the pagan authorities. Marcellinus was one of the “traditores,” the “handers-over.” It is also likely that at some point he o
ff
ered sacrifice in a pagan ritual. His death is recorded on 24 October 304; it is not clear whether he repented and was martyred, or whether he died a natural death. Later tradi- tion has embraced the story of his martyrdom and endowed him with the title of Saint, but those closest in time to the events of the persecution in Rome thought of him as an apostate.

There was, possibly, a three and a half year wait before the next pope was appointed. Marcellus became Bishop of Rome at an uncertain date, perhaps at the end of 306 but possibly as late as May or June 308. Not that the Roman Christians were without a leader: it is likely that Marcellus, though only a priest, took charge

– which is why he was eventually elected when the persecution died down. It may even be that it was not the persecution that held up an election but the sharp division in the Church because of the per- secution. The Christians of Rome were certainly divided between those who favored leniency toward the penitent lapsed and those who wanted a more rigorous discipline to be imposed before

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they were allowed to return. Marcellus was in the latter camp. Feelings ran so high that there was fighting on the streets, and the emperor seems to have punished the pope by imposing on him, first, a period of what might today be called “community service” working in public stables in what is now the via del Corso, and then sending him into exile. It was in exile from Rome that he died in January 309.

The problems did not go away. It is not clear whether Marcellus’s successor, Eusebius, was chosen within a couple of months of Marcellus’s death or more than a year later. He was probably elected on 18 April, but it could have been in 309 or 310. He, too, had to deal with the ongoing di
ffi
culty of the penitent lapsed, but he was more lenient. He was, however, opposed by one Heraclius; again there was rioting, and again the pope, and Heraclius, were deported – to Sicily, where Eusebius died. He had been pope for only about four months. The date of accession of Miltiades, who followed him, is consequently also uncertain, and nothing in par- ticular is recorded of his election – nor of that of Silvester, who was elected on 31 January 314 and did not die until the very last day of 335, one of the longest pontificates in the whole of papal his- tory, and of remarkable length for these early centuries. Mark’s pontificate, on the other hand, which came next, was short – only eight months. He died on 7 October 336. Mark, however, made one decision which was to be of immense significance from time to time in the history of papal elections: he decided that the Bishop of Ostia, the town not far from Rome which was the city’s port, should be the one to perform the ceremony of consecrating the pope.

After Mark’s death there was a hiatus of several months before Julius was elected on 6 February 337. The gap is unexplained, but it may reflect the tensions of the Arian controversy, about the exact nature of the relationship of God the Father to God the Son, which was then deeply dividing the Church. Julius was a vigorous anti- Arian, so there may have been a struggle for leadership between

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those in Rome who wanted a softer line and Julius’s faction – not, it should be emphasized, that the Christians of Rome were much caught up in the theological niceties of the controversy at the time. Again after Julius’s death there was something of a gap. Over a month passed before Liberius was chosen, and again it is possible that there was a dispute between pro- and anti-Arians. If so, the anti-Arians again won out, for Liberius, elected on 17 May 352, was of a similar mind to Julius.

But then he wobbled. The emperor was sympathetic to the Arians and ordered the pope’s arrest – but secretly, for Liberius was extremely popular in the city and the authorities feared rioting. He was taken first to Milan and then, when he proved immovable, into a two-year exile in what is now Northern Greece. There, it seems, his spirit broke. He wrote letters disavowing the great opponent of Arianism whom he had hitherto steadfastly supported, Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria. In Sirmium (Mitrovica in what is now Serbia), he signed a profession of faith that was pro-Arian. He was then allowed to return to Rome where, it must be said in his defense, he later atoned for his doctrinal “wobble.”

Hilary, Bishop of Poitiers and one of the firm anti-Arians, com- mented that it was di
ffi
cult to say whether the emperor “committed a greater crime by exiling Liberius or by sending him back to Rome.” The confusion surrounding his return led to one of the bloodiest incidents in the history of papal elections.

2

In spite of wobbling on Arianism, Pope Liberius died much revered on 24 September 366. We know he was revered because when he was exiled to Thrace in 355 for his support of the controversial Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria, Roman Christians took an oath that they would not accept any other bishop in his place. They were, however, reckoning without the Emperor Constantius II. What Liberius regarded as Constantius II’s heretical views had led the emperor to attempt to depose Athanasius. Now Constantius imposed his own candidate on the bishopric of Rome. His choice was Felix, Liberius’s archdeacon. He was the second pope of that name.

As a person, Felix II remains something of an unknown quan- tity. Obviously he must have been a man of ability, otherwise he would not have risen to the rank of archdeacon. He was prepared to betray his former master and accept the o
ffi
ce of Bishop of Rome at the behest of the emperor, yet it was he, it seems, who was responsible for the idea of the oath in support of Liberius in the first place. Athanasius, who was far from being an impartial witness to Roman goings on, said that Felix was elected in the imperial palace – presumably in Milan, where by this time the Roman Emperor in the West had his residence – with imperial eunuchs standing in for the people of Rome. After his election he was consecrated, reported Athanasius, by villainous bishops.

The Roman people were not of a mind to receive Felix as their bishop. There was so much civil disturbance that the emperor