Urban I

Pope Urban I was bishop of Rome from 222 until 230, in the early third century of the Common Era. He followed Callixtus I in the Roman see and was followed by Pontianus. Almost nothing about his life can be established from documents written in his own lifetime. The principal early witnesses are Eusebius of Caesarea, who in the fourth century noted Urban's place in the succession of Roman bishops in the Ecclesiastical History, and the so-called Liberian Catalogue, a list of Roman bishops compiled in the mid-fourth century, which assigns Urban a pontificate of some eight years during the time of Elagabalus and Alexander Severus, conventionally dated from 222 to 230. The later Liber Pontificalis, assembled in the sixth century and often untrustworthy for the first centuries, calls him a Roman, the son of Pontianus. No year of birth is recorded in any ancient source, and modern historians do not attempt to supply one.

His episcopate unfolded during the rule of the emperor Alexander Severus, a stretch of years in which the Christian community at Rome enjoyed comparative quiet. Later tradition held that the emperor's household contained Christians and that imperial policy was not hostile to the Church; no general persecution is attested at Rome between the death of Callixtus and the later exile of Pontianus. Internally, however, the Roman church remained divided. The learned presbyter Hippolytus, who had already broken with Callixtus over questions of discipline and theology, continued as leader of a separate congregation. That schism outlasted Urban and was resolved only when both Hippolytus and Pope Pontianus were deported to the mines of Sardinia in the persecution that began under Maximinus Thrax after Alexander's death. No genuine letters, sermons, or canons of Urban have been preserved, so the character of his government of the church is unknown.

Medieval readers inherited a much fuller, but largely fictional, portrait. The Liber Pontificalis ascribes to Urban a decree permitting the faithful to make offerings to the Church and a rule that sacred vessels should be of silver; both notices reflect the property and liturgy of a later period and are not evidence for third-century practice. The fifth-century legendary Acts of Saint Cecilia made Urban a central figure in the conversion of the Roman matron Cecilia and of her husband Valerian and brother-in-law Tiburtius, and described him as the bishop who buried Cecilia after her martyrdom. That story shaped art and liturgy for centuries, yet it is a work of hagiographic fiction composed some two hundred years after Urban's death. Urban himself came to be honored as a martyr, but the early Roman Depositio martyrum does not include him, and the political climate of 230 does not suggest a violent death. He almost certainly died in peace at Rome in that year.

Even the site of his grave is debated. The Liber Pontificalis places it in the cemetery of Praetextatus beside the Via Appia. A fragmentary Greek epitaph naming an Urban, discovered in the papal crypt of the Catacomb of Callixtus, has been taken by other scholars as evidence that the pope was buried among his third-century predecessors there; the inscription may, however, commemorate another bishop of the same name. In either case the burial was in the catacombs outside the walls of Rome. Cult of Urban as a saint is of long standing. The Roman Martyrology records him on 25 May, a date that remained in the General Roman Calendar until the reform of 1969, when his feast was dropped from the universal calendar because of the extreme poverty of historical information, though it is still noted in the Martyrology. Western devotion sometimes blended him with Saint Urban of Langres, a fourth-century Gallic bishop whose feast falls on the same day and who is the traditional patron of vineyards and wine-growers. Those patronages should not be ascribed to the Roman pope. Nothing reliable is known of Urban's family life, and the later religious orders did not exist in his time; he is remembered solely as a bishop of Rome in a poorly documented generation of the early Church.