Pope Cletus

Pope Cletus, also called Anacletus or Anencletus, is venerated as the third Bishop of Rome after Saint Peter and Saint Linus, and as the immediate predecessor of Saint Clement I. Early Christian writers did not always use a single form of his name. Saint Irenaeus of Lyons, writing in the late second century, lists Anacletus in the Roman succession; Eusebius of Caesarea and other Greek sources use Anencletus; Latin tradition often prefers Cletus, which is probably a shortened form of the same Greek name, meaning blameless. For many centuries the Roman Church treated Cletus and Anacletus as two successive popes, an error visible in the Liber Pontificalis and in older papal catalogs. Modern historical study and the official chronology of the Holy See regard them as one bishop. Almost no contemporary documentation of his life survives. What is known is reconstructed from second- to fourth-century succession lists, from Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History, and from much later Roman tradition.

The dates of his episcopate cannot be fixed with precision. Irenaeus gives the order of bishops but not years. Eusebius assigns Anencletus a reign of twelve years in the generation after the apostles. The Liber Pontificalis, a later compilation whose early lives are largely legendary, likewise gives twelve years and places his rule from the time of Vespasian to that of Domitian, yielding conventional modern dates that vary between about 76–88 and about 80–92. The Annuario Pontificio has long listed Anacletus (Cletus) as pontiff from 80 to 92. These figures are scholarly conventions, not independently attested calendar years. He would have led the Roman Christian community in the last quarter of the first century, under the Flavian emperors, in a period when the Church in Rome was still a relatively small, largely Greek-speaking, and at times persecuted minority.

Later Roman sources supply a biography that historians treat with great caution. The Liber Pontificalis describes Cletus as a Roman, the son of Emilianus, from the region of the Vicus Patricius, and states that he was ordained by Saint Peter. It credits him with dividing Rome into twenty-five parish districts, or tituli, and with ordaining a number of priests. He is also said to have built or arranged a memorial at the grave of Saint Peter on the Vatican Hill. None of these claims can be confirmed from first-century evidence; they reflect the way later Roman clergy imagined the origins of their parochial system and of the Vatican shrine. Whether he died a martyr is likewise unproven. Medieval tradition numbered the earliest popes among the martyrs, and Cletus was long so commemorated, but no reliable account of a trial or execution exists. He is believed to have died in Rome and to have been buried near Peter on the Vatican Hill, in the cemetery that later became the site of Old Saint Peter’s Basilica.

The cult of Saint Cletus is ancient in the city of Rome. The Roman Martyrology records his feast on 26 April. When Cletus and Anacletus were still distinguished as two saints, Anacletus was kept on 13 July; that second commemoration was eventually dropped. In the calendar reform of 1960–1969, Cletus, like many other early popes, was removed from the General Roman Calendar because so little historically certain could be said of him, but he was retained in the Martyrology and may still be celebrated locally. He was never the subject of a formal papal canonization; his sainthood belongs to the ancient, pre-congregational veneration of the Roman Church. No well-documented medieval or modern patronages are attached to his name. For the historian, Cletus remains a figure known almost solely as a name in the apostolic succession of Rome: a bishop who stood between Linus and Clement, whom the second-century Church already remembered as a link in the chain that bound the Roman see to Peter and Paul.