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Biography

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Xystus, more commonly known in later Latin usage as Pope Sixtus II, was Bishop of Rome in the mid-third century and is one of the most securely attested martyred popes of the early Church. He succeeded Pope Stephen I and occupied the Roman see for a brief period, conventionally dated from late August 257 until his death on 6 August 258. Contemporary evidence for his pontificate and death is unusually strong for this era: Cyprian of Carthage recorded the execution in a letter written within weeks of the event, and Dionysius of Alexandria corresponded with Xystus on questions of baptism and church discipline. The Greek form of the name, Xystus, is the form used by these Eastern and African writers and by the Roman Canon of the Mass; Sixtus is the later Latinized spelling. Later Roman tradition, preserved in the sixth-century Liber Pontificalis, described him as a Greek and a former philosopher, but those details are not confirmed by third-century sources and remain unverified.

His short reign fell entirely within the persecution initiated by the emperor Valerian. An edict of 257 had forbidden Christian assemblies and required members of the clergy to take part in Roman sacrifice; a harsher rescript in 258 ordered the summary execution of bishops, priests, and deacons. According to Cyprian's Letter 80, Xystus was executed in a cemetery on 6 August 258, together with four deacons. Later tradition, including an epitaph composed by Pope Damasus I in the fourth century, presents the pope as seized while seated and teaching, or while celebrating the liturgy, in one of the suburban cemeteries on the Appian Way, most often identified as the cemetery of Callistus, though some accounts associate the arrest with the nearby cemetery of Praetextatus. He was beheaded on the spot. Deacons named in the martyrological tradition as dying with him or in the same persecution include Januarius, Vincentius, Magnus, Stephanus, Felicissimus, and Agapitus. Four days later the Roman deacon Lawrence was put to death; later legend tightly bound Lawrence's martyrdom to that of Xystus, though the contemporary record does not narrate that connection in the elaborate form given by the medieval passio.

During the preceding pontificate of Stephen I, a sharp dispute had arisen between Rome and the churches of Africa and Asia Minor over whether converts baptized in schism or heresy should be received by laying on of hands or rebaptized. Stephen had insisted on the Roman practice of not repeating baptism; Cyprian and many African bishops held the opposite view. Xystus appears to have adopted a more irenic stance than his predecessor. Fragments of correspondence preserved by Eusebius of Caesarea show Dionysius of Alexandria writing to Xystus about Novatianist and other baptismal cases. The Roman see under Xystus did not press the quarrel to a rupture, and relations with Carthage remained intact. Cyprian's prompt report of the pope's martyrdom itself suggests that communion between the two churches had not been broken.

Xystus was buried in the papal crypt of the Catacomb of Callixtus on the Via Appia, where Damasus later marked the tomb with verses commemorating the pope and his clergy. The cult is ancient: his name appears in the Communicantes of the Roman Canon alongside Linus, Cletus, Clement, Cornelius, Cyprian, and Lawrence, a grouping that reflects third-century Roman and African martyr memory. Liturgical historians generally identify the Xystus of the Canon with this third-century martyr rather than with the earlier and far more poorly documented Pope Xystus I of the second century. In the General Roman Calendar the feast of Sixtus II and his companion martyrs is kept on 7 August, having been moved from 6 August so as not to coincide with the Feast of the Transfiguration. Little can be said with confidence about his birth, family, or life before the episcopate; no reliable source records a year or place of birth, and claims of marriage or children are undocumented. What remains historically firm is the fact of his brief leadership of the Roman church in a time of imperial violence, the date and circumstances of his execution as reported by a contemporary bishop, and the early and continuous liturgical remembrance of Xystus as pope and martyr.

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