Pope Callistus

Callistus I, whose name is also spelled Callixtus, served as Bishop of Rome in the early third century and is traditionally listed as the sixteenth pope. Almost nothing about his birth or family can be dated with precision; even his year of birth is unknown. The principal near-contemporary narrative of his earlier life is the bitterly hostile account given by Hippolytus of Rome in the Refutation of All Heresies. Hippolytus states that Callistus was a slave of Carpophorus, a Christian belonging to the imperial household in Rome. Carpophorus set him to manage a bank in which fellow Christians deposited money. After the enterprise collapsed, Callistus fled, was caught at Portus, and, according to this account, tried to drown himself. He was put to the mill as punishment, then released at the pleading of Christians, and later caused a disturbance in a synagogue while seeking to recover funds from Jewish debtors. Brought before the prefect Fuscianus, he was scourged and sentenced to the mines in Sardinia as a Christian.

During the reign of Commodus, Marcia, a Christian and the emperor's companion, obtained from Pope Victor I a list of confessors in the Sardinian mines in order to secure their release. Callistus was among those freed, whether or not Victor had intended to include him. Victor then, Hippolytus claims, sent Callistus to Antium with a monthly allowance. Under Victor's successor Zephyrinus, Callistus was brought back to Rome, ordained deacon, and entrusted with the clergy and with the administration of the cemetery on the Appian Way. That cemetery, later called the Catacomb of Callixtus, became the official burying place of the third-century bishops of Rome, though Callistus himself would not be laid to rest there. When Zephyrinus died, about 217, Callistus was chosen bishop of Rome. Hippolytus refused to accept the election and headed a rigorist opposition, so that later tradition treated Hippolytus as an antipope.

The conflict between Callistus and Hippolytus mixed theology and discipline. Hippolytus accused Callistus of leaning toward Sabellian modalism—identifying Father and Son too closely—while Callistus in turn is said to have charged Hippolytus's party with ditheism. On penitential practice Callistus allowed those who had committed adultery or fornication to be reconciled to the Church after due penance, a policy Hippolytus regarded as a dangerous innovation. Callistus is also reported to have accepted as valid the unions of free women with slaves or men of lower status, against the grain of Roman civil law, and to have permitted men who had been married more than once, and even men who had been involved in public office or other previously barred conditions, to serve among the clergy. These measures, whether or not every detail in Hippolytus is fair, mark Callistus as a figure who widened the Church's pastoral reach in a mixed urban community of slaves, freedmen, and immigrants. The much later Liber Pontificalis, whose third-century notices are often schematic, calls him a Roman, son of Domitius, attributes to him a basilica in Trastevere (linked by tradition with Santa Maria in Trastevere), and credits him with arranging the four seasonal Ember fasts; those institutional claims cannot be confirmed from strictly contemporary sources.

Callistus died in 222, in the reign of Alexander Severus. The fourth-century Depositio martyrum commemorates him on 14 October at the third milestone of the Via Aurelia, in the cemetery of Calepodius, which was his burial place. He was thus honored as a martyr within about a century of his death, although Eusebius of Caesarea does not describe him as such, and the later Latin Passio that has him flung into a well during a riot is generally judged legendary. A death amid street violence in the Trastevere region remains possible. Relics associated with him were subsequently translated, including to Santa Maria in Trastevere and to the church of San Callisto. His feast is kept on 14 October in the Roman calendar. Because of his administration of the Appian Way cemetery and his own burial among the Roman dead, he has been invoked as a patron of cemetery workers. His pontificate, brief and poorly documented apart from a polemical rival, remains important for the history of Roman penitential discipline, for the organization of the Christian cemeteries, and for the emergence of a more inclusive pastoral practice in the church of the capital.