Pope Stephen

Pope Stephen I was Bishop of Rome from 254 to 257, in the generation after the Decian persecution. The Liber Pontificalis, compiled centuries later, identifies him as a Roman, the son of Jovius; no surviving third-century source gives a birth year or describes his career before the papacy. He succeeded Lucius I during a lull in imperial action against Christians, before Valerian’s measures against the clergy. The Roman church was still recovering from the schism of Novatian, who had set himself up as a rigorist rival bishop of Rome in 251, and from disputes over how to treat Christians who had lapsed under persecution.

Two episodes known from the letters of Cyprian of Carthage show Stephen exercising appellate authority beyond Italy. In Spain, the bishops Basilides of Emerita (Mérida) and Martial of Legio (León) had been deposed, among other reasons for compromising during persecution. They obtained from Stephen a decision restoring them. Cyprian and a Spanish synod regarded the restoration as improper and held that the local churches were not bound by it. In Gaul, Faustinus of Lyon and other bishops complained that Marcian of Arles had adopted Novatianist rigorism and refused reconciliation to the lapsed. Cyprian urged Stephen to write to the Gallic churches and to have Marcian replaced, implying that the Bishop of Rome had not yet acted as firmly as African bishops wished.

The gravest conflict of the pontificate concerned baptism conferred outside the Church. Cyprian, supported by African synods and by bishops in Asia Minor, taught that there was no true baptism among heretics and that persons coming from groups such as the Novatianists must be baptized in the Catholic Church. Stephen taught that baptism in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit was valid even when performed by a heretic, and that such persons should be received by the laying on of hands in penance, not by a second baptism. He declined to receive Cyprian’s envoys and was prepared to treat churches that rebaptized as out of communion. Firmilian of Caesarea, writing to Cyprian, denounced Stephen’s stance and his appeal to Roman custom. The dispute remained unresolved at Stephen’s death; subsequent Western practice followed the Roman recognition of heretical baptism when the Trinitarian form had been used.

Stephen died in 257 and was buried in the papal crypt of the Cemetery of Callixtus on the Via Appia. Later Roman tradition, recorded in the Liber Pontificalis and in martyrologies, presents him as a martyr beheaded on 2 August while seated on his cathedra during the Valerian persecution. That account is not corroborated by Cyprian or by other near-contemporary writers, and many modern historians regard the martyrdom as unproven. His name nonetheless entered the cult of the Roman martyrs. He is commemorated on 2 August in the Roman Martyrology and is venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church and in the Eastern Orthodox Church. No medieval or modern papal act of canonization applies to him; his cult belongs to the ancient, pre-congregational layer of Roman sanctoral memory.