Pope Cornelius

Pope Cornelius was Bishop of Rome from 251 until 253, in the aftermath of the Decian persecution. After Pope Fabian was martyred in January 250, the Roman see remained vacant for more than a year because the imperial edict made an election dangerous. When pressure eased after Decius's death, the Roman clergy elected Cornelius, a priest of the city. Almost nothing can be verified about his life before that election. The later Liber Pontificalis calls him a Roman and names his father as Castinus, and tradition associated him with the gens Cornelia, but those genealogical claims are not confirmed by contemporary documents.

His election was at once contested by Novatian, a Roman priest of rigorous views who had himself consecrated as a rival bishop and is the first antipope for whom substantial historical evidence survives. The dispute turned on the lapsi, Christians who had sacrificed or obtained certificates of compliance during the persecution. Novatian held that apostasy could not be forgiven by the Church; Cornelius, backed by most of the Roman clergy and by Cyprian of Carthage, held that the lapsed could be restored to communion after penance. Cornelius convened a synod at Rome, attended by some sixty bishops, which confirmed his election, rejected Novatian, and defined a moderate penitential policy. Letters exchanged with Cyprian, including a report by Cornelius that the Roman church then numbered forty-six priests, seven deacons, seven subdeacons, forty-two acolytes, fifty-two exorcists, readers and doorkeepers, and more than fifteen hundred widows and persons in distress, remain principal sources for the organization of the mid-third-century Roman community.

Under the emperor Trebonianus Gallus, hostility resumed. Cornelius was arrested and exiled to Centumcellae (modern Civitavecchia) on the Tyrrhenian coast, where he died in June 253. The Liber Pontificalis and martyrological tradition present him as a martyr, some accounts stating that he was beheaded; many modern historians judge that he died from the hardships of exile rather than by formal execution, but he has been venerated as a martyr from antiquity. He was succeeded by Lucius I. He was buried in the Catacomb of Callixtus on the Via Appia, in a chamber distinct from the papal crypt, under a Latin inscription identifying him as Cornelius Martyr. Relics associated with him were later translated, and cult centers developed at Kornelimünster near Aachen and at Compiègne in France.

Cornelius is commemorated in the Roman calendar on 16 September together with Cyprian of Carthage. Popular devotion has invoked him against earache, epilepsy, fever, and twitching, and he has been regarded as a patron of cattle and domestic animals. His brief pontificate is documented chiefly through the Cyprianic correspondence and through the archaeological evidence of his tomb; those sources, rather than later legendary lives, are the basis for what can be said of him with confidence.