Pope Eutychian

Pope Eutychian, whose name appears in Latin as Eutychianus, was Bishop of Rome in the later third century. The Chronography of 354, also called the Liberian Catalogue, assigns him a pontificate of eight years, eleven months, and three days, from 4 January 275 until 7 December 283. He succeeded Pope Felix I and was succeeded by Pope Caius. The sixth-century Liber Pontificalis describes him as a Tuscan, the son of a man named Marinus, and a native of the city of Luna, the ancient settlement now known as Luni in northwestern Italy. No contemporary source records the year or circumstances of his birth, and nothing reliable is known of his life before he became bishop of Rome.

His years as pope fell during a comparatively quiet interval for the Christian church in the Roman Empire. After the short-lived measures against Christians associated with the emperor Aurelian, imperial policy toward the church remained largely inactive until the Great Persecution begun by Diocletian in 303. Eutychian's pontificate therefore belonged to the period sometimes called the Little Peace of the Church. In that span the imperial throne passed through Aurelian, Tacitus, Florian, Probus, Carus, and the colleagues Carinus and Numerian, and into the first years of Diocletian. No genuine letters or theological treatises by Eutychian have survived, and later medieval writers did not preserve a substantial authentic dossier of his acts.

The Liber Pontificalis nevertheless attributes several deeds to him. It states that he allowed the faithful to present the fruits of the earth to be blessed on the altar, a notice that, whether or not it reflects a genuine third-century regulation, belongs to the history of Roman liturgical custom. The same text asserts that he buried three hundred twenty-four martyrs with his own hands and that he ordained fourteen priests, five deacons, and eight bishops. Historians treat the large number of burials as legendary, because the years 275 to 283 were not a time of widespread martyrdom in Rome. The ordination figures are likewise impossible to verify. These notices illustrate how later compilers filled the gaps in the early papal lists rather than how a third-century bishop actually administered his church.

Physical evidence of his burial is stronger. In the papal crypt of the Catacomb of Callixtus on the Appian Way, the nineteenth-century archaeologist Giovanni Battista de Rossi recovered a fragmentary Greek inscription reading EUTUCHIANOS EPIS, which is accepted as the epitaph of this pope. The placement accords with the Liber Pontificalis, which records that Eutychian was buried in the cemetery of Callistus. His cult as a saint rests on this ancient Roman tradition rather than on a later papal canonization. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on 8 December, the day following the date given for his death. That feast was observed in the General Roman Calendar until the liturgical reform of 1969, after which he remained in the Martyrology without a universal obligatory celebration. Beyond these liturgical and archaeological facts, the biography of Eutychian remains obscure, as is true of most bishops of Rome in the third century.