Pope Saint Eusebius: The Thirty-First Pope, the Schism Over the Lapsed, and the Enemy Exiled Beside Him

The thirty-first in a series on the popes.

We know Pope Eusebius almost entirely from a poem, and the poem is about a war. A little over half a century after he died, another bishop of Rome—Damasus, a poet-pope with a genius for turning marble into propaganda—had eight lines of verse cut into a slab and set over Eusebius’s grave in the catacomb of Callixtus. Those eight lines are the closest thing to a biography that survives. They do not describe a saintly administrator quietly shepherding his flock. They describe sedition, slaughter, and exile, a Christian people torn into factions, and two men driven out of the city together by a pagan emperor’s rage. That a pope who governed for four months should be remembered at all is remarkable. That he should be remembered for a civil war inside the Church is the whole point.⁠¹

The war was over mercy. Some six years before Eusebius took office, the emperor Diocletian had launched the last and worst of the great persecutions to fall on the Roman Church, and when it lifted it left behind an army of the fallen—Christians who had sacrificed to the gods, or burned incense, or bought certificates saying they had, to save their lives. The question of what to do with them when they came back weeping had already broken the Church once, under Pope Cornelius in 251. Now it broke it again. Eusebius inherited that question, held the line his predecessors had held, and paid for it with his throne and his life. His reign is a footnote in most histories. It is also a window—onto the hardest pastoral problem of the early Church, and onto the doctrine that answered it: that the keys given to Peter can unlock any door, even the one an apostate shut behind himself.

A word on where this entry falls. It comes out of strict sequence. Four popes reigned between Felix I, the twenty-sixth pope, and Eusebius—Eutychian, Caius, Marcellinus, and Marcellus I. But Eusebius belongs beside Cornelius, because his crisis is Cornelius’s crisis played a second time, in a harsher key, under a different persecution. The two men are separated by nearly sixty years and joined by a single question. To understand Eusebius is to watch the Church face that question again, and answer it the same way, and pay for the answer.

The Pope We Know from a Poem

Start with what can and cannot be known, because the sources for Eusebius are unusually thin and unusually treacherous. There are essentially three.

The first is the Liber Pontificalis, the “Book of the Popes,” a serial biography of the Roman bishops first compiled in the sixth century. On Eusebius it is almost worthless. It says he was a Greek by birth and had been a physician—natione Grecus, ex medico—which may well be true and is at least plausible.⁠² Then it collapses. It gives his reign as six years, when the contemporary evidence gives four months; it dates him to the reign of Constans, decades off; and it drapes over his entry a famous legend that belongs to someone else entirely—the finding of the True Cross and the baptism of the Jew Judas Cyriacus. None of this is history. It is the accretion of centuries, and the sober scholarly rule is to set the Liber Pontificalis aside wherever a better source contradicts it, which for Eusebius is nearly everywhere.⁠³

The second source is the Liberian Catalogue, a bare list of popes with reign lengths embedded in the Chronography of 354, a Roman almanac put together within living memory of Eusebius’s own century. It is terse and reliable where the Liber Pontificalis is voluble and wrong. It gives Eusebius a reign of about four months, from the eighteenth of April to the seventeenth of August—but, tellingly, it attaches no consular year to his entry, and this omission is the root of a genuine puzzle.⁠⁴ The older reference works place his reign in “309 or 310” and leave it open; the New Catholic Encyclopedia commits to 309; and the historian Raymond Davis has argued, on the internal chronology of the catalogue, that the true year was 308. The honest position is the cautious one. Eusebius reigned for four months in the neighborhood of 309, and the exact year cannot be fixed.⁠⁵

The third source is the one that matters, and it is the epitaph. Damasus, who governed Rome from 366 to 384, made it his life’s work to restore and celebrate the tombs of the Roman martyrs, composing verse inscriptions for them and having his calligrapher, Furius Dionysius Filocalus, cut them in a distinctive elegant script now called Philocalian.⁠⁶ For Eusebius he wrote eight hexameter lines, and because Damasus’s poems can be securely dated to his own papacy, they are gold: they prove that Eusebius’s cult was established at Rome no later than the 380s, and they preserve a narrative of his reign that no other early source supplies. The original slab was smashed—probably in one of the sixth-century wars, at the hands of Goths or Lombards—and replaced with a copy cut, economically, on the back of a three-centuries-old pagan dedication to the emperor Caracalla. Both were lost for a millennium until the great archaeologist Giovanni Battista de Rossi, excavating the catacomb of Callixtus in the 1850s, found the fragments in a chamber now known as the Crypt of Eusebius.⁠⁷ Nearly everything that follows rests, directly or indirectly, on those recovered stones.

The Wound Diocletian Left

To see why a four-month reign turned into a civil war, you have to see the wound the Church was carrying when Eusebius inherited it.

In February of 303, the emperor Diocletian issued the first of a series of edicts that opened what Christians would remember simply as the Great Persecution. Churches were to be leveled, the Scriptures burned, Christians of rank stripped of their standing; clergy were imprisoned and then, by every device of pressure, compelled to sacrifice.⁠⁸ In the West the fury spent itself within two or three years—it had largely lapsed by 305, and in Rome the accession of Maxentius in 306 brought it to an end—but by then the damage inside the Church was done. It was not counted in martyrs. It was counted in apostates.

For most of those who complied did so from terror, not conviction, and had every intention of remaining Christians. The early Church had developed a precise and unlovely vocabulary for the ways one could fall. There were the sacrificati, who had actually offered sacrifice to the idols; the thurificati, who had burned incense before the statues of the gods; and the libellatici, who had not sacrificed at all but had obtained—often by bribery—a certificate, a libellus, falsely attesting that they had. The Diocletianic persecution added a category of its own, the traditores, the “handers-over,” clergy who had surrendered the sacred books to be burned. When the persecution passed, all of them wanted back in.⁠⁹

And here was the problem that no amount of goodwill could dissolve. It was a well-established principle of the second- and early-third-century Church that an apostate, even a penitent one, could not simply be received back into communion, because idolatry stood among the gravest sins a Christian could commit—one of the three, with murder and adultery, that severed a person from the Body of Christ.⁠¹⁰ The rigor was not cruelty for its own sake. It expressed a real conviction that the Church was the assembly of the holy and that baptism, which washes sin away once, could not become a door that swung both ways. Set that conviction against a Church suddenly full of thousands of the repentant fallen, and you have the makings of a schism. The only question was how the makings would combine.

The Ghost of Novatian

They had combined once already, and violently, and the memory shaped everything that happened under Eusebius. Two generations earlier, in the aftermath of the emperor Decius’s persecution of 250, exactly this question had split the whole Church. When Pope Cornelius held that the lapsed could be reconciled after due penance, a rigorist Roman presbyter named Novatian had himself consecrated a rival bishop of Rome and declared that the Church had no power to readmit apostates at all. His followers took the name katharoi, “the pure.” The wider Church, from Carthage to Alexandria, sided with Cornelius and condemned Novatian, and the position he championed acquired a permanent name: Novatianism, the Church’s standing term for any rigorism that would lock the door of forgiveness against the grave sinner.⁠¹¹

The Roman Church came out of that crisis with a settled policy, and it is the policy Eusebius would defend. The apostates were not to be debarred forever, as Novatian demanded; neither were they to be waved back in at once, without penance, as a laxist faction had wanted. They were to be readmitted—but only after a real and often prolonged period of public penance proportioned to the gravity of the fall.⁠¹² It was a middle way, and like most middle ways it satisfied no one at the extremes. Fifty-eight years later, when the Diocletianic persecution filled the Roman Church with a new generation of the fallen, the extremes came back. The middle way had to be defended all over again, and the popes who defended it were destroyed in the process.

Two Popes, One Storm

Eusebius was the second of two bishops of Rome to be broken on this question in as many years, and the first was his immediate predecessor.

After Pope Marcellinus died in 304, at the height of the persecution, the Roman see stood effectively empty for years; only when Maxentius’s accession brought peace could a successor be chosen, and around 306 to 308 the choice fell on Marcellus I. He found the Roman Church in ruins—its meeting places confiscated, its cemeteries seized, its ordinary life shattered—and set about rebuilding it, reorganizing the city into ecclesiastical districts, the tituli, each under a presbyter charged among other things with directing the penance of the many who were converting and returning.⁠¹³ That last detail is the crucial one: Marcellus was rebuilding the machinery of penance at precisely the moment the crisis of the lapsed detonated. He insisted that the fallen perform the prescribed penance before readmission; a faction led, according to Damasus, by an apostate who had denied the faith even before the persecution rose against him; and the resulting disorder gave Maxentius his pretext. The pope was seized and sent into exile, where he died.⁠¹⁴

Damasus wrote an epitaph for Marcellus, too, and it reads almost as a first draft of the one he would write for Eusebius: the truth-telling shepherd who bade the fallen weep for their sins becomes for that very reason the enemy of them all; hatred, discord, sedition, and slaughter follow; and the pope is driven from his homeland by the savagery of a tyrant, for a crime that was another man’s.⁠¹⁵ Change the names and it is the same poem, because it was the same storm. Eusebius walked into it knowing, or soon learning, what it had done to the man before him. He held the line anyway.

Eusebius and Heraclius

Now the epitaph itself, the eight lines on which the whole story turns. In Dennis Trout’s translation of Damasus’s poem, they run:

Heraclius forbade the lapsed to lament their sins,
Eusebius instructed the wretched to weep for their faults.
The people are broken into parties, with fury blazing up.
Sedition, murder, war, discord, quarrels.
Suddenly they were equally struck by the savage rage of the tyrant,
although the bishop preserved untouched the pacts of peace.
Joyous he preferred exile with the Lord as his judge;
he abandoned the world and his life on the Trinacrian shore.⁠¹⁶

Compressed into those lines is an entire ecclesiastical crisis. A rival named Heraclius—a man otherwise unknown to history, attested by this poem alone—stood against the pope over the treatment of the lapsed. The Christian community of Rome fractured into warring parties. The violence escalated through the grim catalogue Damasus lays out like a drumbeat: seditio, caedes, bellum, discordia, lites—sedition, slaughter, war, discord, strife. And then the emperor intervened, and both men were expelled together, though Damasus insists the pope himself had kept the peace intact. Eusebius went into exile gladly, Damasus says, and died on the Trinacrian shore—Trinacria being the old poetic name for triangular Sicily, an echo Damasus lifts straight from Virgil’s Aeneid.⁠¹⁷

The heart of the poem is the opening couplet, and it contains a puzzle that scholars have never fully solved. “Heraclius forbade the lapsed to lament their sins; Eusebius instructed the wretched to weep for their faults.” About Eusebius the line is clear: he championed penance, the discipline of tears and public sorrow that reopened the door to communion. But what was Heraclius? To “forbid the lapsed to lament their sins” can be read two opposite ways. It can mean that Heraclius was a laxist, leading the apostates themselves in a demand to be readmitted without the humiliating labor of penance—telling them, in effect, that they need not weep at all. Or it can mean that Heraclius was a rigorist in the mold of Novatian, forbidding the fallen the penitential path back to communion altogether—telling them their tears were pointless because the door was shut for good.⁠¹⁸

The great reference works lean toward the first reading. The Catholic Encyclopedia judges it “by far more probable” that Heraclius headed “a party made up of apostates and their followers, who demanded immediate restoration to the body of the Church,” and J. N. D. Kelly’s Oxford Dictionary of Popes follows suit.⁠¹⁹ But the New Catholic Encyclopedia takes the opposite view, casting Heraclius as the rigorist—so that, in a small irony that captures the state of the evidence, two standard Catholic reference works written by two scholars both named Kelly land on contrary readings of the same line.⁠²⁰ The historian Raymond Davis put the ambiguity plainly: in prohibiting the lapsed from bewailing their sins, Heraclius “may either have wanted their readmittance without further ado, or have intended to bar them permanently.”⁠²¹ The Latin will not decide between them.

Yet the ambiguity, real as it is, leaves the important thing untouched. Whichever error Heraclius represented, Eusebius stood in the same place either way: for the Roman discipline, against both the rigorism that would readmit no one and the laxism that would readmit everyone at once. He occupied Cornelius’s middle ground—the fallen may return, but they must first weep—and, like Marcellus before him, he was destroyed defending it. Damasus, who cared about the doctrine and not about identifying Heraclius for later historians, gave us the one fact that mattered to him and to the Church: on which side the true pope stood.

Maxentius, the Even-Handed Tyrant

The emperor who exiled Eusebius was not persecuting him, and the distinction is worth insisting on, because it is easy to miss and it changes the whole meaning of his exile.

Maxentius, who controlled Rome, Italy, and Africa from 306 until his death at the Milvian Bridge in 312, was no Diocletian. He had ended the persecution in his territories, and he was, if anything, a calculating friend of the Church: the hostile Christian sources concede that he stopped the harassment of Christians, and he would soon order the restoration of the property that had been confiscated from the Roman Church during the persecution.⁠²² When he deported Eusebius, he was not acting as a persecutor of the faith. He was acting as a magistrate keeping the peace. The Christian factions were rioting in his capital, and he did what a Roman official did with men whose quarrels spilled into the streets: he removed the disputants—all of them, on both sides.

This is why Heraclius was exiled too. Damasus’s own line makes the even-handedness explicit—the two men were struck “equally” by the tyrant’s rage, pariter pulsi—and it is the strangest, most human detail in the whole story: a pope banished side by side with the very man he had been fighting, the two of them shipped out together like brawlers hauled from a tavern.⁠²³ Damasus is careful to add that Eusebius had done nothing to earn it, that he “preserved untouched the pacts of peace” while others made war. But the Roman state did not draw fine distinctions between the shepherd and the men disturbing his flock. It saw disorder, and it exiled the pope along with the man who caused it. Eusebius suffered, in the exact sense, not for a crime but for keeping order that others broke—which is precisely why the Church would remember his banishment as a kind of witness.

The Sicilian Shore

Eusebius died in exile on Sicily, within months of leaving Rome, and the see he left behind stood empty for the better part of a year.⁠²⁴ Only on 2 July 311 did his successor, Miltiades, ascend the papal throne—and it was under Miltiades, in the calm that followed Maxentius’s fall, that the exiled pope was finally brought home.⁠²⁵ His body was carried back to Rome and, on the twenty-sixth of September, laid in a separate chamber of the catacomb of Callixtus on the Via Appia. We know the date because the Depositio Episcoporum, the burial calendar embedded in that same Chronography of 354, records it.⁠²⁶

The place of his burial tells its own quiet story. Most of the third-century popes lay together in the Crypt of the Popes, the papal chapel at the heart of the Callixtus complex. Eusebius did not. He was laid in a chamber of his own, some distance off, and it is there—not among his predecessors but apart from them—that his cult took shape and that Damasus set his epitaph.⁠²⁷ When de Rossi rediscovered that chamber in the mid-nineteenth century, he found in it the fragments of Damasus’s original inscription and the sixth-century copy that had replaced it, and so restored to history a pope who had nearly vanished from it. The chamber has been called the Crypt of Eusebius ever since. It is a strange kind of immortality: a man remembered because a later pope loved the martyrs enough to carve their stories in stone, and because a nineteenth-century scholar dug the stone back out of the ground.

Martyr or Confessor?

Was Eusebius a martyr? The question is more interesting than it looks, and the Church’s own answer has shifted over the centuries in a way worth tracing.

Damasus thought so. His epitaph titles Eusebius outright—Eusebio episcopo et martyri, “for Eusebius, bishop and martyr”—and the reasoning is the ancient one: a bishop who suffered exile and death for the faith was counted a martyr as truly as one who died under the sword.⁠²⁸ The Catholic Encyclopedia preserves that judgment cleanly: “His firm defense of ecclesiastical discipline and the banishment which he suffered therefor caused him to be venerated as a martyr, and in his epitaph Pope Damasus honours Eusebius with this title.”⁠²⁹ On this understanding Eusebius stands with Cornelius and Pontian, popes who died not by execution but of the rigors of banishment and were honored as martyrs all the same.

Yet the modern Church has grown more careful. Eusebius did not die a violent death; he died in exile, which is martyrdom by extension and interpretation, not by blood. And the current Roman Martyrology, revised after the Second Vatican Council, reflects exactly that caution. It moved his commemoration from its old date of 26 September—the day of his burial—to 17 August, the day of his death, and when it names him it calls him simply “Saint Eusebius, pope.” It praises him as a valiant witness of Christ who was deported to Sicily and died exiled from his homeland; it stops short of conferring the formal title of martyr.⁠³⁰ The tension is real and worth stating honestly rather than smoothing over: an ancient pope venerated as a martyr on the authority of a fourth-century poem, whom the Church’s own official calendar now lists, with deliberate precision, as a pope and a witness but not a martyr.

There is one more layer, and it belongs to Damasus himself. Damasus became pope in 366 through a disputed and bloody election—rival factions fought in the streets and in the basilicas, and people died—and the scholar Marianne Sághy has argued that when Damasus carved the story of Eusebius’s schism, with its sedition and slaughter and its innocent bishop caught in the violence of others, he was also writing about his own contested rise.⁠³¹ If she is right, the epitaph is not only the earliest source for Eusebius but a small act of self-justification by the man who preserved him: one embattled pope reaching back across a half-century to claim a predecessor whose troubles mirrored his own. It would not be the last time a pope found his own reflection in the popes who came before.

Why a Four-Month Pope Still Matters

Peel away the archaeology and the poetry and the dating disputes, and Eusebius’s four months come down to a single conviction, held under pressure and paid for in exile: that the Church has the authority to forgive the fallen and to bring them home. That conviction is not a footnote. It is the seed of one of the most consoling doctrines the Catholic Church holds.

The power at issue is the power of the keys. When Christ told Peter, “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven,” and when the risen Christ breathed on the apostles and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them,” he gave the Church a genuine authority over sin—not merely to announce God’s forgiveness but to convey it.⁠³² The Catechism states the principle Eusebius was defending without a trace of hedging: “There is no offense, however serious, that the Church cannot forgive.”⁠³³ That sentence is the exact opposite of what Novatian taught and what the rigorist reading of Heraclius would have meant, and the Church made it dogma precisely by refusing, again and again, to lock the door those men wanted shut.

The Catechism even preserves, in its history of the sacrament of Penance, a description of the very discipline Eusebius fought for. “During the first centuries,” it explains, “the reconciliation of Christians who had committed particularly grave sins after their Baptism (for example, idolatry, murder, or adultery) was tied to a very rigorous discipline, according to which penitents had to do public penance for their sins, often for years, before receiving reconciliation.”⁠³⁴ Idolatry heads that list, and idolatry is exactly what the lapsed had committed. The “order of penitents,” the graded years of public sorrow, the eventual reconciliation—this is the machinery Eusebius insisted the fallen must pass through, and it is the ancestor of the sacrament of Reconciliation that Catholics still receive. The Fathers called penance “the second plank after the shipwreck which is the loss of grace”—a second chance for the baptized who fall, which is just what Novatian and the rigorists denied there could be.⁠³⁵

And here is the vindication that gives Eusebius’s short, unhappy reign its meaning. Sixteen years after he died on the Sicilian shore, the whole Church assembled at Nicaea, and among the canons it enacted were several on the lapsed—graded penances of years for those who had fallen under the more recent persecution of Licinius in the East, a settled procedure of hearers and prostrators working their slow way back to the altar.⁠³⁶ One canon closed the rigorist option for good. Even the gravest penitent, Nicaea ruled, must not be denied reconciliation and the Eucharist at the point of death: “if any man be at the point of death, he must not be deprived of the last and most indispensable Viaticum.”⁠³⁷ Another canon required the Novatianists themselves, if they wished to return, to accept communion with the very penitents they had shunned.⁠³⁸ The council did not name Eusebius. It did not have to. It made universal law of the discipline he had been exiled for defending—the discipline that Cornelius, Marcellus, and Eusebius had all upheld at the cost of exile and death—and in doing so it settled the question that had convulsed the Roman Church for two generations. The door stays open. The keys of Peter turn both ways. A four-month pope who died for that principle deserves to be remembered for more than the brevity of his reign.

The story of Eusebius ends where his successor’s begins: it was Miltiades, the thirty-second pope, who brought his body home from Sicily and buried it in the ground where Damasus would one day carve his name.

Further Reading

For the early papacy in general, the two indispensable reference works are J. N. D. Kelly and Michael J. Walsh, The Oxford Dictionary of Popes, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2010), and Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes, 4th ed. (Yale University Press, 2014). On Damasus and the epitaphs that are our chief witness to Eusebius, the standard modern edition, with text, translation, and commentary, is Dennis Trout, Damasus of Rome: The Epigraphic Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2015); the older critical edition is Antonio Ferrua, Epigrammata Damasiana (Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana, 1942). On the Diocletianic persecution and the crisis of the lapsed, see W. H. C. Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church (Blackwell, 1965). The primary sources are close at hand: the Catholic Encyclopedia article “Pope St. Eusebius” (1909); the Damasan epitaph, with the archaeological context of its rediscovery, in the University of Oxford’s Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity database; and the canons of the First Council of Nicaea in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 14.

This post is part of an ongoing series on the popes. You can read about Saint Peter, the first pope, Saint Linus, the second pope, Saint Anacletus, the third pope, Saint Clement, the fourth pope, Saint Evaristus, the fifth pope, Saint Alexander I, the sixth pope, Saint Sixtus I, the seventh pope, Saint Telesphorus, the eighth pope, Saint Hyginus, the ninth pope, Saint Pius I, the tenth pope, Saint Anicetus, the eleventh pope, Saint Soter, the twelfth pope, Saint Eleutherius, the thirteenth pope, Saint Victor I, the fourteenth pope, Saint Zephyrinus, the fifteenth pope, Saint Callixtus I, the sixteenth pope, Saint Urban I, the seventeenth pope, Saint Pontian, the eighteenth pope, Saint Anterus, the nineteenth pope, Saint Fabian, the twentieth pope, Saint Cornelius, the twenty-first pope, Saint Lucius I, the twenty-second pope, Saint Stephen I, the twenty-third pope, Saint Sixtus II, the twenty-fourth pope, Saint Dionysius, the twenty-fifth pope, and Saint Felix I, the twenty-sixth pope.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Pope Saint Eusebius?

Eusebius was the thirty-first Bishop of Rome, counting Peter as first, and he reigned for only about four months in 309 or 310. Almost everything known about him comes from a verse epitaph composed by a later pope, Damasus, and recovered by archaeologists in the nineteenth century. His pontificate was consumed by the controversy over the lapsi—Christians who had denied the faith during the Diocletian persecution and now sought readmission. Eusebius held that they could be reconciled after doing penance; a rival named Heraclius opposed him; the disorder grew violent; and the emperor Maxentius exiled both men. Eusebius died in exile on Sicily and was later venerated as a martyr.

Why was Pope Eusebius exiled, and by whom?

The emperor Maxentius, who controlled Rome from 306 to 312, exiled Eusebius—not as a persecutor of Christianity, which he had in fact stopped in his territories, but as a magistrate suppressing public disorder. The Christian community of Rome had split into rioting factions over the readmission of the lapsed, and Maxentius removed the disputants on both sides. This is why Eusebius’s opponent Heraclius was deported along with him. Eusebius was banished to Sicily, where he died within months. Because he suffered exile and death for defending the Church’s discipline, he came to be honored as a martyr.

Who was Heraclius, and what did he believe?

Heraclius was the leader of a faction that opposed Eusebius over the lapsed, and he is known only from Damasus’s epitaph—no other source mentions him. The epitaph says he “forbade the lapsed to lament their sins,” but that line can be read two ways, and scholars genuinely disagree. He may have been a laxist, leading the apostates in a demand to be readmitted without the labor of penance; or he may have been a rigorist in Novatian’s mold, denying that the fallen could be reconciled at all. The leading reference works favor the laxist reading, but the Latin does not settle it. Either way, Eusebius stood for the middle position: the fallen may return, but only after genuine penance.

Is Pope Eusebius a saint, and when is his feast day?

Yes. Eusebius is venerated as a saint, and Pope Damasus’s fourth-century epitaph already honors him as a martyr. His older feast fell on 26 September, the anniversary of his burial in the catacomb of Callixtus. The current Roman Martyrology keeps his commemoration on 17 August, the anniversary of his death, and titles him simply “Saint Eusebius, pope”—describing him as a valiant witness of Christ who died in exile, but stopping short of the formal title of martyr, since he did not die a violent death.

How does Eusebius connect to the sacrament of Confession?

Eusebius was defending the Church’s authority to forgive grave post-baptismal sins—specifically, the apostasy of the lapsed—through a discipline of penance. That authority is the “power of the keys” Christ gave to Peter and the apostles, and the ancient “order of penitents,” with its years of public penance before reconciliation, is the direct ancestor of the sacrament of Reconciliation, or Confession, that Catholics receive today. The Catechism traces the modern sacrament back to exactly this early discipline, and states the principle Eusebius fought for: there is no offense, however serious, that the Church cannot forgive. Sixteen years after his death, the Council of Nicaea made that discipline universal law.

Footnotes

1. 1. The epitaph is Damasus, Epigrammata 18 (ed. Ferrua) = Inscriptiones Christianae Urbis Romae, n.s., vol. 4, no. 9515. Text and translation in Dennis Trout, Damasus of Rome: The Epigraphic Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 117–19, no. 18. On the epitaph as effectively the sole narrative source for Eusebius's reign, see Johann Peter Kirsch, "Pope St. Eusebius," The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 5 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1909), NewAdvent.org, and the Oxford Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity database, ed. David Lambert, record E07167.

2. 2. Liber Pontificalis, "Eusebius": natione Grecus, ex medico ("a Greek by nation, formerly a physician"). Latin text ed. Louis Duchesne, Le Liber Pontificalis, vol. 1 (Paris, 1886), 167. The physician detail is plausible but rests on the Liber Pontificalis alone.

3. 3. The Liber Pontificalis assigns Eusebius a reign of years rather than months, dates him to the reign of Constantius, and imports into his entry the legend of the finding of the True Cross and the baptism of Judas Cyriacus—an intrusion that belongs to a separate hagiographical tradition and has no bearing on the historical pope. On the low reliability of the Liber Pontificalis for the pre-Constantinian popes, see Kelly and Walsh, The Oxford Dictionary of Popes, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 2010), Introduction.

4. 4. The Liberian Catalogue (the list of Roman bishops in Part 13 of the Chronography of 354) gives Eusebius four months and sixteen days (m. IIII d. XVI), from 18 April (XIIII kal. Maias) to 17 August (XVI kal. Sept.)—the duration figure slightly exceeds that calendar interval, a minor inconsistency in the catalogue's transmitted numbers—and attaches no consular year to the entry. Text at tertullian.org. The Catholic Encyclopedia follows the catalogue: "His reign was short. The Liberian Catalogue gives its duration as only four months, from 18 April to 17 August, 309 or 310."

5. 5. The "309 or 310" range is the position of Kirsch, Catholic Encyclopedia (1909); Kelly and Walsh, Oxford Dictionary of Popes, likewise leave the year open. The New Catholic Encyclopedia assigns 309. Raymond Davis, "Pre-Constantinian Chronology: The Roman Bishopric from AD 258 to 314," Journal of Theological Studies 48, no. 2 (1997): 439–70, esp. 463, argues for 308 on the internal chronology of the catalogue. This post uses "309 or 310" as the conventional range while noting the dispute.

6. 6. On Damasus's program of monumentalizing the martyr tombs and the "Philocalian" lettering of his calligrapher Furius Dionysius Filocalus, see Trout, Damasus of Rome, 42–52, and Oxford Cult of Saints, E07167. Filocalus signed the Eusebius inscription Furius Dionysius Filocalus scribsit, styling himself Damasus's "admirer and friend" (cultor adque amator).

7. 7. The original inscription was smashed—most likely during the sixth-century wars, whether at the hands of the Goths (530s–550s) or the Lombards (590s)—and replaced with a copy carved on the reverse of an existing dedication to the emperor Caracalla dating to 214 (CIL 6.1067). Giovanni Battista de Rossi found the fragments of both in the Crypt of Eusebius during his excavation of the catacomb of Callixtus in the 1850s; see de Rossi, La Roma sotterranea cristiana, vol. 2 (Rome, 1867), 191–210, and Oxford Cult of Saints, E07167.

8. 8. Eusebius of Caesarea, Historia Ecclesiastica VIII.2.4, trans. A. C. McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 1: the edicts commanded "that the churches be leveled to the ground and the Scriptures be destroyed by fire," with clergy imprisoned and pressed to sacrifice. The first edict is standardly dated to 24 February 303. Available at NewAdvent.org. (This Eusebius, the church historian of Caesarea, is not to be confused with the pope.)

9. 9. On the vocabulary of the lapsed—sacrificati, thurificati, libellatici, and the persecution-specific traditores—see "Lapsi," The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910), NewAdvent.org, and "Libellatici, Libelli," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9. Several genuine Egyptian libelli survive on papyrus.

10. 10. "Lapsi," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9: "it was a well-established principle in the Church of the second and beginning of the third century that an apostate, even if he did penance, was not again taken into the Christian community"; idolatry stood among "the three capital sins which entailed exclusion from the Church," with murder and adultery.

11. 11. On the Decian crisis, the Novatian schism, and its resolution in favor of readmission after penance, see the fuller treatment in the entry on Pope Saint Cornelius in this series, with Eusebius of Caesarea, Hist. Eccl. VI.43, and "Novatian and Novatianism," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 11 (1911).

12. 12. Kirsch, "Pope St. Eusebius," Catholic Encyclopedia: Eusebius "maintained the attitude of the Roman Church, adopted after the Decian persecutions (250–51), that the apostates should not be forever debarred from ecclesiastical communion, but on the other hand, should be readmitted only after doing proper penance."

13. 13. On Marcellus I's reorganization of the Roman Church into tituli charged with the direction of penance, and the state of the Church after the persecution, see "Pope St. Marcellus I," The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910), NewAdvent.org. The dates of Marcellus's reign (roughly 306/308–309) are themselves uncertain.

14. 14. "Pope St. Marcellus I," Catholic Encyclopedia, paraphrasing Damasus: Marcellus, "because he insisted that they should perform the prescribed penance," was regarded "as a wicked enemy" by the lapsed; at the head of the opposing party stood "an apostate who had denied the Faith even before the outbreak of persecution"; "serious conflicts arose, some of which ended in bloodshed," and Maxentius "had the pope seized and sent into exile," where he died.

15. 15. Damasus's epitaph for Marcellus (Oxford Cult of Saints, record E07191) closely resembles the Eusebius poem in language and imagery, as noted at E07167: the truthful shepherd who bade the fallen weep for their sins becomes for that reason "a bitter enemy" to all, provoking discord, sedition, and slaughter, and is driven from his homeland by the tyrant for another man's crime.

16. 16. Damasus, Epigrammata 18, trans. Trout, Damasus of Rome, 117–18, as reproduced in Oxford Cult of Saints, E07167. The Latin of the opening couplet: Heraclius vetuit lapsos peccata dolere, / Eusebius miseros docuit sua crimina flere.

17. 17. The catalogue of strife is Damasus's line 4: seditio caedes bellum discordia lites. "Trinacria" (litore Trinacrio, "on the Trinacrian shore") is the old poetic name for Sicily, evoking its three promontories; Damasus's phrase echoes Virgil, Aeneid 1.196. See Oxford Cult of Saints, E07167.

18. 18. The interpretive difficulty turns on the phrase vetuit lapsos peccata dolere, "forbade the lapsed to lament their sins," which can support either a laxist or a rigorist reading of Heraclius's position. See the discussion in Oxford Cult of Saints, E07167.

19. 19. Kirsch, "Pope St. Eusebius," Catholic Encyclopedia: "Whether the latter and his partisans advocated a more rigorous (Novationist) or a more lenient interpretation of the law has not been ascertained. The latter, however, is by far more probable in the hypothesis that Heraclius was the chief of a party made up of apostates and their followers, who demanded immediate restoration to the body of the Church." Kelly and Walsh, Oxford Dictionary of Popes, s.v. "Eusebius," follow the laxist reading.

20. 20. The New Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. "Heraclius, Antipope," casts Heraclius as favoring "a harsh treatment for those who had lapsed"—the rigorist reading. The two reference works thus disagree, one authored in the tradition of J. N. D. Kelly and the other by J. F. Kelly.

21. 21. Davis, "Pre-Constantinian Chronology," 467–68, as quoted in Oxford Cult of Saints, E07167: in prohibiting the lapsed from bewailing their sins, Heraclius "may either have wanted their readmittance without further ado, or have intended to bar them permanently."

22. 22. On Maxentius's ending of the persecution in Italy and Africa, see "Maxentius," The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 10 (1911), NewAdvent.org; Eusebius of Caesarea, Hist. Eccl. VIII.14.1, hostilely concedes that Maxentius "commanded his subjects to cease persecuting the Christians." The restoration of confiscated Church property, effected early in the pontificate of Miltiades (from 311), is attested by Augustine, Breviculus collationis cum Donatistis III.18.34.

23. 23. Damasus, Epigrammata 18, line 5: extemplo pariter pulsi feritate tyranni, "suddenly they were equally struck by the savage rage of the tyrant." The adverb pariter ("equally," "alike") marks the even-handedness of the deportation. "Lapsi," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9, states that "the confusion and disputes caused by this difference among the Roman Christians caused Maxentius to banish Marcellus and later Eusebius and Heraclius."

24. 24. Kirsch, "Pope St. Eusebius," Catholic Encyclopedia: "both Eusebius and Heraclius were exiled by Emperor Maxentius. Eusebius, in particular, was deported to Sicily, where he died soon after."

25. 25. Miltiades (Melchiades) became pope on 2 July 311 (Kirsch, "Pope St. Eusebius"). The return of Eusebius's body coincided with the beginning of Miltiades's reign; the Oxford Cult of Saints (E07167) places the reburial "soon after Maxentius was ousted by Constantine in 312." No source states expressly that Miltiades ordered the translation, though the coincidence of dates makes it the natural inference.

26. 26. Kirsch, "Pope St. Eusebius": "The body of his predecessor was brought back to Rome, probably in 311, and 26 September (according to the 'Depositio Episcoporum' in the chronographer of 354) was placed in a separate cubiculum of the Catacomb of Callistus."

27. 27. On Eusebius's burial apart from the Crypt of the Popes, in the chamber later called the Crypt of Eusebius, and de Rossi's rediscovery of it, see Oxford Cult of Saints, E07167, and de Rossi, Roma sotterranea, vol. 2, 191–210.

28. 28. The concluding prose line of the inscription reads Eusebio episcopo et martyri, "for Eusebius, bishop and martyr" (Trout, Damasus of Rome, 118; Oxford Cult of Saints, E07167). Aside from the epitaph and the seventh-century Notitia ecclesiarum urbis Romae, which may depend on it, no early source calls Eusebius a martyr.

29. 29. Kirsch, "Pope St. Eusebius," Catholic Encyclopedia: "His firm defense of ecclesiastical discipline and the banishment which he suffered therefor caused him to be venerated as a martyr, and in his epitaph Pope Damasus honours Eusebius with this title. His feast is yet celebrated on 26 September."

30. 30. Martyrologium Romanum, editio typica altera (Vatican City, 2004), 17 August: "In Sicily, Saint Eusebius, pope, who, a valiant witness of Christ, was deported to this island by the Emperor Maxentius and, exiled from the land of his birth, merited to attain the heavenly kingdom; his body was transferred to Rome and laid to rest in the cemetery of Callixtus" (English rendering). The title given is "pope" (papa), not "pope and martyr." The older feast, per the Catholic Encyclopedia, fell on 26 September.

31. 31. Marianne Sághy, "Scinditur in partes populus: Pope Damasus and the Martyrs of Rome," Early Medieval Europe 9, no. 3 (2000): 273–87, argues that Damasus drew a deliberate parallel between the strife of Eusebius's day and the violence surrounding his own contested election of 366. See Oxford Cult of Saints, E07167.

32. 32. Matthew 16:19 and John 20:22–23. On the power of the keys as the ministry of reconciliation exercised by the apostles and their successors, see Catechism of the Catholic Church §§981–983, at vatican.va.

33. 33. Catechism of the Catholic Church §982: "There is no offense, however serious, that the Church cannot forgive. 'There is no one, however wicked and guilty, who may not confidently hope for forgiveness, provided his repentance is honest.' Christ who died for all men desires that in his Church the gates of forgiveness should always be open to anyone who turns away from sin." At vatican.va.

34. 34. Catechism of the Catholic Church §1447, at vatican.va. The paragraph goes on to describe the "order of penitents," to which "one was only rarely admitted and in certain regions only once in a lifetime."

35. 35. Catechism of the Catholic Church §1446, quoting Tertullian, De Paenitentia 4, 2: the Fathers present the sacrament of Penance as "the second plank [of salvation] after the shipwreck which is the loss of grace." At vatican.va.

36. 36. First Council of Nicaea (325), canons 11–14, trans. Henry Percival, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 14 (1900), NewAdvent.org. Canon 11 imposes on those who lapsed under Licinius three years among the "hearers," seven as "prostrators," and two more communicating in prayers without oblation.

37. 37. First Council of Nicaea, canon 13, trans. Percival, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 14: "if any man be at the point of death, he must not be deprived of the last and most indispensable Viaticum." The canon secures reconciliation and Communion for even the gravest penitent at death, foreclosing the rigorist position.

38. 38. First Council of Nicaea, canon 8, trans. Percival, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 14: the "Cathari" (Novatianists) who return to the Church must "communicate with persons who have been twice married, and with those who having lapsed in persecution have had a period of penance laid upon them"—that is, they must accept the very reconciliation of the lapsed that they had denied.