Pope Anaclete

Pope Anacletus, also known as Cletus or Anencletus, is traditionally counted as the third Bishop of Rome after Saint Peter and Saint Linus, and as the predecessor of Saint Clement I. His name is Greek (Anenkletos, often rendered as blameless or unimpeached). The earliest surviving witness to his place in the Roman succession is Irenaeus of Lyons, writing in the late second century, who lists the bishops of Rome after the apostles Peter and Paul as Linus, then Anacletus, then Clement. Eusebius of Caesarea, Augustine, Optatus of Milevis, and other ancient Christian writers give the same sequence. In some medieval papal catalogues Cletus and Anacletus appear as two different men; modern historical and liturgical practice treats them as one person, Cletus being understood as a shortened or Latinized form of Anacletus.

Almost nothing about his life can be established from contemporary evidence. The Liber Pontificalis, compiled centuries later, describes Cletus as a Roman from the district of the Vicus Patricius and the son of a man named Emilianus, while recensions that split the two names sometimes call Anacletus a Greek from Athens, the son of Antiochus. These notices are not independently corroborated and are treated by historians as largely legendary. No reliable source records a year of birth, a family, a spouse, or children. His episcopate is placed in the last decades of the first century, in the generation after the apostles and during the Flavian period at Rome. Ancient writers assign him a tenure of about twelve years, but the precise calendar dates differ among the Liberian Catalogue, Eusebius, and later lists, and no exact year of death is historically secure.

Later tradition, again chiefly the Liber Pontificalis, credits him with ordaining priests and with dividing Rome into parish districts. Such administrative details reflect the organization of the Roman church in a later age and cannot be taken as historical for the first century. The community he led was still a relatively small, Greek-speaking as well as Latin-speaking Christian body in the capital, living under a pagan imperial order and without the later public basilicas or a fully developed papal monarchy. Whether he died as a martyr is unknown. Later martyrologies sometimes style the earliest popes as martyrs, but there is no contemporary testimony to a martyrdom of Anacletus.

Tradition holds that he was buried near the body of Saint Peter on the Vatican hill. His cult is ancient. When Cletus and Anacletus were commemorated as two saints, Cletus was kept on 26 April and Anacletus on 13 July; after they were recognized as the same figure, the Roman liturgy retained 26 April. He is venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church and is honored among the first bishops of Rome in other Christian traditions that preserve that succession. No distinctive later patronages of places, trades, or causes are securely attached to his name in the major liturgical and hagiographical sources.

Historically, Anacletus belongs to the poorly documented interval between the apostolic generation and the better-attested Roman episcopate of the second century. What can be said with confidence is that the church in Rome remembered a leader of that name in the line from Peter, that second-century writers already treated that memory as authoritative, and that later centuries honored him among the earliest popes while surrounding him with biographical details that cannot be verified.