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Biography

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Callistus, also known as Callixtus, served as Bishop of Rome in the early third century and is counted among the early popes and martyrs of the Roman church. Almost all contemporary information about his life before and during his pontificate comes from the Refutation of All Heresies by Hippolytus of Rome, a learned presbyter who became Callistus’s bitter opponent and is often regarded as the first antipope. According to that hostile narrative, Callistus was a slave of Carpophorus, a Christian attached to the imperial household in Rome. Carpophorus set him over a bank that held deposits from other Christians; when the enterprise failed, Callistus fled, was recaptured, and after further incidents—including a disturbance in a synagogue—was condemned to the mines of Sardinia. He obtained release when Marcia, the Christian concubine of the emperor Commodus, secured a pardon for Christian confessors at the request of Pope Victor I. Victor then sent Callistus to Antium with an allowance.

Under Pope Zephyrinus, Callistus was brought back to Rome, ordained deacon, and given charge of the Christian cemetery on the Appian Way. That burial complex, later called the Catacombs of Saint Callistus, became the principal cemetery of the Roman church in the third century and the resting place of several popes and many martyrs; the so-called Crypt of the Popes within it remains a major archaeological site. Callistus was Zephyrinus’s chief collaborator in the administration of the Roman church. After Zephyrinus died, around the year 217, Callistus was elected bishop of Rome. Hippolytus rejected the election, accusing Callistus of doctrinal unreliability and moral laxity, and gathered a rigorist following of his own.

The disputes of Callistus’s pontificate concerned both theology and penitential practice. Hippolytus charged him with favoring, or at least failing to suppress, modalist teachings associated with Sabellius, though Callistus in fact excommunicated Sabellius. On discipline, Callistus admitted to communion, after penance, those who had committed grave sins such as adultery and fornication, and he recognized certain unions between free women and slaves or freedmen that Roman civil law did not regard as legitimate marriage. Rigorists, including Hippolytus at Rome and the Montanist Tertullian in North Africa, denounced these policies as a betrayal of evangelical holiness. The conflicts illustrate the third-century struggle over the bishop’s power to forgive sins and over how a rapidly growing church should treat sinners, slaves, and converts from other Christian groups.

Later tradition, found in the Liber Pontificalis and in legendary acts composed centuries afterward, portrays Callistus as a martyr, sometimes claiming that he was thrown into a well in the Trastevere district of Rome during a popular riot. Historians note that the reign of Alexander Severus was not a period of general persecution, so the precise circumstances of Callistus’s death in 222 remain uncertain, even though his cult as a martyr is ancient. He was buried in the cemetery of Calepodius on the Via Aurelia. His feast is observed on 14 October. Relics associated with him came to be venerated at the basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere and at the nearby church of San Callisto, while the catacombs that bear his name on the Appian Way stand as the most enduring monument of his deaconate and of early Roman Christianity. He is invoked as a patron of cemetery workers.

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