Feast day: October 14

Pope St. Callistus I

Pope, Martyr · d. 222

Patron of —

A former slave once imprisoned and sentenced to the mines who rose to become pope, governed with mercy toward repentant sinners, and was martyred in a riot.

Callistus — or Calixtus — became Bishop of Rome about the year 218 and reigned for some five years in the early third century. His life is unusually well documented for so early a pope, though largely through the hostile pen of his rival Hippolytus, who despised him; even read critically, it is a remarkable story of a man who rose from slavery to the papacy.

According to those accounts, Callistus began as a slave, was put in charge of a bank by his Christian master, lost the deposits, fled, and was caught and condemned — first to hard labour, then, after further misadventures, to the deadly mines of Sardinia, from which he was eventually freed. Whatever the truth of the details, an early pope set him over the Christian cemetery on the Appian Way that still bears his name — the catacomb of Callistus, where many popes were buried.

Elected pope himself, he became the target of fierce attacks from rigorists like Hippolytus for his merciful policies: Callistus held that the Church could forgive and readmit even grave sinners after due penance, and recognized certain marriages that the strict would not — positions that, in the long run, the Church upheld as his.

He died about 223 and was honoured from the earliest times as a martyr, though he lived in a period of relative peace; tradition says he was killed in a popular riot. He is remembered as a pope of mercy and as the keeper of the catacombs of Rome.

He went from convicted slave in the mines to bishop of Rome, and gave his name to the catacombs where many early popes were buried.

Image: Unknown authorUnknown author (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/03183d.htm