Confessor Pope Damasus

Pope Saint Damasus I, often styled Confessor in liturgical books, was Bishop of Rome from 366 until his death in 384. He was born in Rome in the early fourth century to a family of Hispanic origin. His father Antonius served the Roman church first as an exceptor (a recorder of documents) and later as a priest; his mother Laurentia and his sister Irene are known chiefly from verse epitaphs that Damasus himself composed. He entered the Roman clergy and served as a deacon under Pope Liberius. During Liberius’s exile under the Arianizing emperor Constantius II, Damasus remained in Rome, a decision that later opponents used against him by alleging that he had compromised with the court party then dominant in the city.

The election that followed Liberius’s death in 366 was among the most violent of the century. One faction of clergy and people chose Damasus; another consecrated the deacon Ursinus. Armed clashes followed, notably at the basilica of Sicininus (later Santa Maria Maggiore), where contemporary reports speak of a large number of dead. The urban prefect and ultimately the emperor Valentinian I recognized Damasus, and Ursinus was banished, though his supporters continued to agitate and to circulate accusations, including a charge of adultery that a synod of bishops dismissed. These events left a lasting stain in sources hostile to the Roman see, but they also show how high the stakes of the Roman episcopate had become once the church was a public institution of the empire.

As pope, Damasus worked to define both the authority of the Roman church and the boundaries of orthodox belief. He opposed remnants of Arianism in the West and condemned Apollinarianism. In letters and through legates he asserted that the Roman see possessed a unique primacy derived from the Apostle Peter. A synod held at Rome in 382 issued a list of the canonical books of the Old and New Testaments that closely resembles the later Catholic canon. Damasus employed as secretary the Dalmatian scholar Jerome and commissioned him to revise the existing Latin translations of the Gospels on the basis of Greek manuscripts; that revision became the nucleus of the Vulgate. Jerome’s prefaces and letters from these years remain important evidence for Damasus’s literary and theological interests.

Damasus is equally remembered as a restorer of the memory of the Roman martyrs. He repaired catacombs and martyr shrines, opened galleries, and composed brief metrical elogia that the calligrapher Furius Dionysius Filocalus cut in a distinctive monumental script. These Damasan inscriptions, surviving in the original or in copies, are fundamental documents for the topography of early Christian Rome and for the growth of martyr cult. He also founded or rebuilt churches in the city, among them the basilica on family property that later became San Lorenzo in Damaso. He died in Rome on 11 December 384 and was buried in a small basilica he had built at the Catacomb of Callixtus on the Via Appia, near the graves of his mother and sister. Relics associated with him were later translated to San Lorenzo in Damaso. The Catholic Church keeps his feast on 11 December. Because of his work in identifying, restoring, and inscribing the tombs of the martyrs, he is honored as patron of archaeologists. He is venerated as a confessor rather than a martyr: a bishop who defended the faith and the dignity of his see without dying by violence.