Sixtus I

Pope Sixtus I, also known in the earliest surviving documents as Xystus, was Bishop of Rome in the early second century, during the reign of the Emperor Hadrian. He is counted as the sixth successor of Saint Peter and therefore as the seventh pope. He followed Pope Alexander I and was himself succeeded by Pope Telesphorus. The exact years of his episcopate are not fixed by any contemporary inscription or administrative record. Later catalogues disagree: the Liberian Catalogue places him roughly from 117 to 126; Eusebius of Caesarea, in different works, offers spans that fall between about 114 and 128. Modern reference works commonly give a pontificate of about a decade ending around 125. Because these figures rest on later compilations rather than on dated acts from his own time, they remain approximate.

The Liber Pontificalis, a later collection of papal lives, states that Sixtus was a Roman, the son of a man named Pastor. Nothing further can be verified about his family, education, or the circumstances of his election. The same source ascribes to him several liturgical and disciplinary rules: that the sacred vessels should be handled only by clergy; that a bishop returning from a visit to the Apostolic See should not be received by his church without papal letters of commendation (the later custom of litterae formatae); and that the Sanctus should be sung by priest and people together at Mass. Historians treat these attributions with caution, because the Liber Pontificalis frequently projected later Roman practice back onto the earliest bishops of the city. No letters, decrees, or other writings that can be securely assigned to Sixtus himself have survived.

The most important early witness to his place in the Roman succession is Irenaeus of Lyons, writing in the later second century, who includes Xystus in his list of the bishops of Rome. Irenaeus does not describe him as a martyr. Later tradition, however, came to regard Sixtus as having died for the faith, and he appears as a martyr in the Roman Martyrology. He is said to have been buried on the Vatican Hill, close to the tomb of Saint Peter. The archaeological and documentary basis for that burial is the same general tradition that locates the graves of several of the earliest popes in that area; no identifiable tomb of Sixtus I has been recovered.

Veneration of Sixtus as a saint is ancient and belongs to the pre-congregational period, when local cult rather than a formal papal process established sanctity. In the Roman Catholic Church his feast has long been kept on 6 April. Some Eastern calendars commemorate him on other days, including 10 August. After the calendar reform of 1969 he was removed from the General Roman Calendar, though he remains in the Martyrology. Because authentic contemporary evidence is so thin, Sixtus I is among the more obscure of the early popes: he is known chiefly through succession lists, a handful of later biographical notices, and the liturgical memory of the Roman church rather than through a recoverable personal history.