Pope Saint Lucius I: The Twenty-Second Pope, the Eight-Month Reign, and the Confessor the Church Mistook for a Martyr

The twenty-second in a series on the popes.

Some popes are hard to write about because the sources contradict each other. Lucius I is hard to write about because there is almost nothing to contradict. He held the chair of Peter for about eight months, most of a single year, a stretch of time so short that Eusebius disposed of his entire reign in one clause. He built nothing that survives, wrote nothing that survives under his own name, and convened no council. And yet the little we have is unusually trustworthy, because part of it comes from a man who knew him and wrote to him while he was alive—Cyprian of Carthage, the most important Latin churchman of the third century, whose letter of congratulation on Lucius’s return from exile still exists. The result is a strange inversion: a pope we can barely see, illuminated for a moment by a first-rate witness. And the moment shows us something the whole series has been circling—the quiet, consequential difference between a confessor and a martyr, and how easily, over the centuries, the second word gets pinned on a man who only ever earned the first.

This is the twenty-second entry in my series on the popes, and it jumps ahead. The series so far has run in strict order from Peter through Callixtus I, the sixteenth; five popes stand between Callixtus and Lucius—Urban I, Pontian, Anterus, Fabian, and Cornelius—and they await their own entries, which I will come back for. Lucius comes out of turn because his brief life sets the trap so cleanly. To read him honestly is to learn how to read the ones around him.

The Pope We Almost Don’t Have

Start with the arithmetic, because even the arithmetic is a lesson in how ancient records decay. Three sources give a reign length, and they do not agree. Eusebius, writing within living memory of the events, says flatly that Cornelius “was succeeded by Lucius,” who “died in less than eight months, and transmitted his office to Stephen.”⁠¹ The Liberian Catalogue, the mid-fourth-century Roman list, records “two years, eight months, and ten days.” The Liber Pontificalis, later still, inflates that to “three years, eight months and ten days.”⁠² Only the “eight months” is real; the “two years” and “three years” are the kind of scribal corruption that creeps into a figure when a copyist’s eye slips. The point is worth pausing on, because it is the methodological key to the entire early papal chronology: where the sources diverge, the earliest and the most economical usually wins, and a suspiciously round or suspiciously large number is usually the error. A modern reader who cites “Pope Lucius, reigned three years” is quoting a mistake.

The reign, then, was short—roughly eight months, from the summer of 253 to the spring of 254.⁠³ Within that window the biography is thin to the point of transparency. The Liber Pontificalis supplies the only claims about his origins—that he was “by nationality a Roman, son of Purphirius”—and the Catholic Encyclopedia’s own historian concedes the obvious about that detail: “Where the author obtained this information is not known.”⁠⁴ We do not know his age, his prior office, the circumstances of his election, or a single word he preached. What we have instead is a situation—the crisis he was elected into—and a witness who wrote to him about it.

Elected Into a Persecution

The crisis was the aftermath of the worst thing that had happened to the Church in its first two and a half centuries. In 250 the emperor Decius had ordered every inhabitant of the empire to sacrifice to the gods and obtain a certificate proving it. For Christians this was apostasy on demand, and enormous numbers complied—some by sacrificing outright, others by bribing officials for the certificate without sacrificing. When the persecution eased, these lapsi, the “fallen,” wanted back in. Could the Church receive them? The rigorists said no: the baptized who had denied Christ had forfeited their place, and the Church had no authority to readmit them. The moderates said yes, after penance. The dispute split the Roman church itself: when Cornelius was elected pope in 251 on the moderate side, the rigorist presbyter Novatian had himself set up as a rival bishop—an antipope—and the schism hardened across the whole Mediterranean.⁠⁵

Cornelius held the line but did not hold it long. A fresh wave of imperial hostility under Trebonianus Gallus sent him into exile at Centumcellae—modern Civitavecchia, up the coast—where he died in the summer of 253.⁠⁶ Into that vacancy the Roman church elected Lucius. The choice was itself a statement: Rome would continue Cornelius’s policy and Cornelius’s fight, and it would do so under the same persecution that had just killed him. Almost at once, the Catholic Encyclopedia notes, “Lucius also was sent into exile soon after his consecration, but in a short time, presumably when Valerian was made emperor, he was allowed to return to his flock.”⁠⁷ The fourth-century Roman catalogue preserves the bare fact in a line that would be copied down the centuries: “Hic exul fuit et postea nutu Dei incolumis ad ecclesiam reversus est”—“He was in exile, and afterwards by the will of God he returned unharmed to the church.”⁠⁸

Hold on to the sequence, because it will matter for the martyrdom question: Lucius was banished under Gallus and came home under Valerian. That is precisely backwards from the legend that would later grow up around his death.

Cyprian’s Letter

Here the eight-month pope steps, briefly, into full light. When Lucius returned from exile, Cyprian of Carthage—who had already written him a first, now-lost letter of congratulation on his election—wrote a second, on the return itself. It survives as Epistle 57 in the standard English (Ante-Nicene Fathers) numbering, Epistle 61 in the critical Latin edition, and it is the single most valuable document we possess about Lucius, because its author was a contemporary bishop corresponding with him in real time.⁠⁹

Cyprian’s theme is the paradox of the interrupted witness. Lucius had been ready to die for the faith and had not been permitted to; did that diminish him? Not at all, Cyprian argues—God had given him a double distinction at his election, “by a double honour” appointing him “in the administration of God’s Church, as well a confessor as a priest,” and the return only enlarged it.⁠¹⁰ The banishment, on Cyprian’s reading, was providentially arranged “not that the bishop banished and driven away should be wanting to the Church, but that he should return to the Church greater than he had left it.” And then the sentence that names the very distinction this post is about:

Among confessors of Christ, martyrdoms deferred do not diminish the merits of confession, but show forth the greatness of divine protection.⁠¹¹

Martyrdoms deferred. Cyprian is telling Lucius, and telling us, that the man is a confessor—one who has suffered for Christ and lived—and that a confessor’s crown is real even when the sword is withheld. He goes further, reading the whole persecution as God’s way of exposing the Novatian schismatics: the state’s violence had fallen “against the Church of Christ and the bishop Cornelius, the blessed martyr, and all of you; so that, for the confusion and beating down of heretics, the Lord might show which was the Church.”⁠¹² The persecutor, Cyprian observes with grim logic, does not bother with heretics; he goes after the genuine article. That Lucius was worth persecuting was itself an argument that Lucius’s church was the true one.

The letter closes on a note that later readers, knowing how the martyr legend would develop, cannot help but find poignant. Cyprian half-hopes the deferred martyrdom will yet come—but at home, among Lucius’s own people, “if the martyrdom of your confession should be consummated away from home,” so that “the victim which affords an example to the brotherhood both of courage and of faith” might be “offered up when the brethren are present.”⁠¹³ Cyprian, who would himself be beheaded outside Carthage five years later with his people watching, was describing a death he understood. Lucius did not get one. He died, so far as any reliable evidence shows, in his bed.

The Lapsi and the Line He Held

If Lucius did anything as pope that we can actually name, it was to keep Rome steady on the question that had made and broken his predecessor. Cyprian tells us so, in a second letter—this one written after Lucius’s death, to Lucius’s successor Stephen, about a rigorist bishop in Gaul who had gone over to Novatian. Marshalling the authority of Rome against the schismatic, Cyprian invokes the two dead popes together:

For the glorious honour of our predecessors, the blessed martyrs Cornelius and Lucius, must be maintained… For they, full of the Spirit of God, and established in a glorious martyrdom, judged that peace should be granted to the lapsed, and that when penitence was undergone, the reward of peace and communion was not to be denied; and this they attested by their letters, and we all everywhere and entirely have judged the same thing.⁠¹⁴

Two things in that passage deserve attention, and they pull in different directions. The first is doctrinal and does Lucius credit: Cyprian says that both Cornelius and Lucius had “attested by their letters”—had ruled in writing—that penitent apostates should be readmitted after penance. Lucius, in his few months, did not merely inherit the moderate policy; he re-issued it under his own hand. On the central pastoral question of the age, the eight-month pope came down, decisively and in writing, on the side of mercy.⁠¹⁵ The Novatian schism, which had raised its antipope against Cornelius, was still live in Rome under Lucius, and Lucius stood exactly where Cornelius had stood.⁠¹⁶

The second thing is the phrase “blessed martyrs Cornelius and Lucius”—and it is the hinge of the whole problem. Here is Lucius’s own friend and contemporary calling him a martyr. If Cyprian says it, how can this post deny it? The answer requires care, and it is the answer the Church itself eventually reached.

The Martyr Who Wasn’t

Cyprian’s “martyr” is an honorific, not a coroner’s finding. In the third century the word still carried its root sense—witness—and it stretched easily to cover a confessor who had suffered for the faith without being killed, especially one who had gone into exile and, as Cyprian’s own letter to Lucius insisted, held a “deferred” martyr’s crown. The Catholic Encyclopedia’s historian, J. P. Kirsch, states the case with precision: Cyprian “gives him, as well as Cornelius, the honorary title of martyr… but probably this was on account of Lucius’s short banishment. Cornelius, who died in exile, was honoured as a martyr by the Romans after his death; but not Lucius.”⁠¹⁷

And the Roman church, in the document that mattered most, agreed. The Chronograph of 354—the almanac that preserves the oldest Roman liturgical calendar—contains two distinct lists: a Depositio Martyrum, the calendar of martyrs’ anniversaries, and a Depositio Episcoporum, the calendar of deceased bishops. The martyr list names the era’s slain: the popes Fabian (20 January) and Sixtus II (6 August), both laid in the cemetery of Callixtus, and Cyprian of Carthage himself (14 September), commemorated there at Rome though he was martyred in Africa.⁠¹⁸ Lucius is not among them. He appears, instead, in the other list, the register of bishops, under 5 March: *“III non. Mar.—Luci, in Callisti.”*⁠¹⁹ The Roman church that buried him, within a century of his death, filed him with the bishops who died in peace, not the martyrs who were slain. As Kirsch puts it, in “the ‘Chronograph of 354’ he is mentioned in the ‘Depositio episcoporum’, and not under the head of ‘Depositio martyrum.’”⁠²⁰

The stone says the same thing. When Giovanni Battista de Rossi excavated the Crypt of the Popes in the Catacomb of Callixtus in the 1850s, he found a fragment of Lucius’s original epitaph. It preserves, in Greek, only the name—ΛΟΥΚΙϹ, Loukis—and the slab breaks off right after it, “so that in all probability,” Kirsch writes, “there was nothing else on it except the title EPISKOPOS (bishop).”⁠²¹ No martyr’s abbreviation, of the kind the crypt’s other slabs carry. The pope’s own tombstone calls him a bishop.

Where, then, did the martyrdom come from? From the Liber Pontificalis, four centuries or more after the fact, which reports that Lucius “was crowned with martyrdom” and, elsewhere in the tradition it fed, that he was beheaded under the emperor Valerian.⁠²² This is not a hard case to decide, because the claim collides with the calendar. Lucius died in March 254. Valerian’s persecution edict did not appear until 257—three years later—and Eusebius is emphatic that in his early years Valerian was, if anything, unusually kind to Christians: he “had been mild and friendly toward the men of God, for none of the emperors before him had treated them so kindly and favorably.”⁠²³ A pope who died three years before a persecution cannot have died in it. Kirsch’s verdict is blunt: “According to the ‘Liber Pontificalis’ this pope was beheaded in the time of Valerian, but this testimony cannot be admitted.”⁠²⁴ The same source, the encyclopedist notes, ascribes to Lucius a decree—that “two priests and three deacons should abide with the bishop to be witnesses for him”—that is likewise a later invention, an anachronism read back onto a third-century pope; and the story that he handed his authority to the archdeacon Stephen as he was led to death is, in Kirsch’s word, “a fabrication.”⁠²⁵

The Church has drawn the honest conclusion, and drawn it officially. When the calendar was reformed in 1969, Lucius’s feast was removed from the General Roman Calendar, “partly because of the baselessness of the title of ‘martyr’ with which he had previously been honoured,” and his commemoration was moved to the day of his death.⁠²⁶ The current Roman Martyrology keeps that commemoration on 5 March, and its wording is a small model of getting the history right: it remembers “Saint Lucius, Pope, successor of Saint Cornelius,” who “for his faith in Christ… suffered exile and acted as an outstanding confessor of the faith, with moderation and prudence, in the difficult times that were his.”⁠²⁷ Not martyr. Confessor. It is the word Cyprian’s own letter had used, seventeen centuries earlier, before the legend intervened—and it is exactly right.

None of this is a demotion. A confessor who accepted exile rather than deny Christ, and who used his handful of months to re-affirm the Church’s power to forgive the fallen, does not need a fictional beheading to be worth remembering. The fiction only obscures the man. This series has watched the same thing happen again and again—Soter, Eleutherius, Victor, Zephyrinus, all handed martyr’s palms by later centuries that the earliest records never gave them—and the pattern with Lucius is only the best-documented instance of it. His predecessor Callixtus, by contrast, is in the Depositio Martyrum, which is why his case is genuinely different and genuinely harder. The lists know the difference. It took the Church a while to remember that they do.

The Grave, the Relics, and a Danish Skull

Lucius was buried where the epitaph was found: in the Crypt of the Popes, the central chamber of the Catacomb of Callixtus on the Via Appia, the burial place the Roman church had organized a generation earlier under the deacon who became Pope Callixtus. It is a striking thing that the earliest bishop the Chronograph of 354 records in its register of the Roman episcopate is, as it happens, Lucius himself—laid among the successors who would fill that crypt for the rest of the third century.⁠²⁸ His broken nameplate, with its four Greek letters, is still shown there.

The relics traveled, as most catacomb relics did, when the popes of the eighth and ninth centuries emptied the crumbling cemeteries into the churches of the city. The Catholic Encyclopedia reports that Lucius’s remains were translated either by Paul I (757–767) to San Silvestro in Capite or by Paschal I (817–824) to the Basilica of Santa Prassede; other traditions place them, with the relics of Saint Cecilia, in Santa Cecilia in Trastevere.⁠²⁹ The branching is typical of medieval relic-history and probably unresolvable now.

The strangest chapter is the most recent, and it makes a fitting coda to a martyrdom that never happened. A relic venerated as Lucius’s skull came, around the year 1100, to Roskilde in Denmark, after Lucius had been made patron saint of the Danish island of Zealand; for centuries it rested in Roskilde Cathedral, and today it is kept in a reliquary in St. Ansgar’s Cathedral in Copenhagen. In recent years Danish researchers subjected the skull to radiocarbon dating, which found that its owner had lived roughly between 340 and 431—a full century after Lucius died. The head that Denmark has venerated as a martyr-pope’s is, the testing concluded, someone else’s entirely.⁠³⁰ There is a certain justice in it. The martyrdom was legend, the beheading was impossible, and the skull is not his. What remains—the eight months, the exile, the letter, the ruling on the lapsed, the four Greek letters on a broken slab—is small, and true, and enough.

What We Can Actually Say

Strip Lucius to the load-bearing evidence and the portrait is brief but clear. A Roman, elected bishop of Rome in the summer of 253 to succeed Cornelius, who had just died in exile; banished almost at once under Trebonianus Gallus and allowed home under Valerian; congratulated on that return by Cyprian of Carthage in a letter that survives, which honors him as a confessor whose martyrdom had been “deferred.” As pope, for about eight months, he held Rome to the moderate policy on the lapsi against the Novatian schism, ruling in writing—Cyprian is our witness—that penitent apostates could be restored after penance. He died on or about 5 March 254 and was buried in the Crypt of the Popes, where his Greek nameplate, bearing the title bishop and no other, was recovered in the nineteenth century.

What the evidence does not support: the beheading, the persecution that supposedly killed him, the martyr’s crown, the disciplinary decree, and the deathbed transfer of power—all of them later accretions, most of them from the Liber Pontificalis, none of them reconcilable with the contemporary record or the fourth-century calendar. Even the honorific “martyr” that Cyprian gave him was, in Cyprian’s own usage, a confessor’s title, and the Roman church’s oldest calendar files him accordingly.

Twenty-two entries into this series, Lucius is the clearest single case of a lesson the series keeps teaching: that the early Church’s memory of its own leaders comes to us in layers, and that the earliest layer—the epitaph, the contemporary letter, the fourth-century list—is almost always more sober, and more reliable, than the golden legend laid over it later. Lucius was not a martyr. He was something the Church had every reason to honor without embellishment: a bishop who paid for the faith with exile, came home, spent his few months defending the wideness of God’s mercy, and died. The Church, having tried the legend and found it hollow, has gone back to calling him what his friend called him and what his tombstone implies—a confessor, and a bishop of Rome.

The series will return to the five popes between Callixtus I and Lucius—Urban I, Pontian, Anterus, Fabian, and Cornelius (the seventeenth through twenty-first)—and then go on to Lucius’s successor, Stephen I.

Further Reading

For the early papacy generally, the indispensable references 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 the mid-third-century crisis that framed Lucius’s reign—the Decian persecution, the lapsi, and the Novatian schism—see W. H. C. Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church (Blackwell, 1965), and the letters of Cyprian themselves, translated by Robert Ernest Wallis in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5 (1886). The primary documentary sources are Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, Book VII, trans. A. C. McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 1 (1890); the Liber Pontificalis in the translation of Louise Ropes Loomis, The Book of the Popes (Columbia University Press, 1916); and the Chronograph of 354, edited by Theodor Mommsen in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. On the Crypt of the Popes and Lucius’s epitaph, the foundational work is Giovanni Battista de Rossi, La Roma sotterranea cristiana (1864–1877).

This post is part of an ongoing series on the popes. You can read about Saint Peter, the first pope, and, most recently, Saint Callixtus I, the sixteenth pope, Saint Zephyrinus, the fifteenth pope, and Saint Victor I, the fourteenth pope.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Pope Saint Lucius I?

Lucius I was the twenty-second Bishop of Rome counting Peter as first, reigning about eight months from the summer of 253 to 5 March 254. He succeeded Cornelius, who had died in exile, was himself banished soon after his election and later permitted to return, and held Rome to the moderate policy of readmitting the lapsi—those who had denied the faith under the Decian persecution—after penance, against the rigorist schism of Novatian. His contemporary Cyprian of Carthage wrote him a surviving letter of congratulation on his return from exile.

Was Pope Lucius I really a martyr?

No. Although he was long venerated as a martyr, the earliest and best evidence is against it. The oldest Roman calendar, the Chronograph of 354, lists Lucius among the deceased bishops (the Depositio Episcoporum), not among the martyrs (the Depositio Martyrum); his surviving tombstone gives only his name and the title “bishop,” with no martyr’s mark; and the Liber Pontificalis’s claim that he was beheaded under Valerian is chronologically impossible, since Valerian’s persecution began in 257, three years after Lucius died. His contemporary Cyprian did call him a “martyr,” but as an honorific for a confessor who had suffered exile, not a claim that he was killed. The 1969 calendar reform removed his feast precisely because the martyr title was baseless.

How long did Pope Lucius I reign?

About eight months. Eusebius, the earliest source, says he “died in less than eight months.” Later catalogues corrupt the figure—the Liberian Catalogue to “two years, eight months, and ten days,” the Liber Pontificalis to “three years”—but these are copying errors; the reign ran only from the summer of 253 to his death on or about 5 March 254.

What did Pope Lucius I do about the lapsi?

He continued the moderate policy of his predecessor Cornelius and of Cyprian of Carthage: those who had lapsed under persecution could be restored to communion after doing penance. According to Cyprian, Lucius did not merely inherit this position but affirmed it in writing during his short reign, against the rigorist Novatian, who denied that the Church could readmit apostates at all.

Where is Pope Lucius I buried?

He was buried in the Crypt of the Popes in the Catacomb of Callixtus on the Via Appia in Rome, where a fragment of his original Greek epitaph—bearing only his name, ΛΟΥΚΙϹ—was recovered by the archaeologist Giovanni Battista de Rossi in the 1850s. His relics were later translated into the churches of Rome (traditions name San Silvestro in Capite, Santa Prassede, and Santa Cecilia in Trastevere), and a skull venerated as his came to Denmark around 1100, though modern radiocarbon dating has shown that skull belonged to a man who lived about a century after Lucius.

When is the feast of Pope Lucius I?

His feast was observed on 4 March from 1602 until the 1969 calendar reform, which removed it from the General Roman Calendar. The current Roman Martyrology commemorates him on 5 March, the date of his burial recorded in the Chronograph of 354, and calls him not a martyr but an “outstanding confessor of the faith.”

Footnotes

1. 1. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica VII.2, trans. A. C. McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 1 (1890): "Cornelius, having held the episcopate in the city of Rome about three years, was succeeded by Lucius. He died in less than eight months, and transmitted his office to Stephen." Available at NewAdvent.org.

2. 2. The Liberian Catalogue (in the Chronograph of 354) gives Lucius "ann. II m. VIII d. X"—two years, eight months, ten days—in Theodor Mommsen, ed., Chronica Minora, vol. 1, MGH Auctores Antiquissimi 9 (Berlin, 1892); the Liber Pontificalis raises this to "3 years, 8 months and 10 days" (Louise Ropes Loomis, The Book of the Popes [Liber Pontificalis] [New York: Columbia University Press, 1916], 28). Both "years" figures are scribal corruptions of a reign that Eusebius and the "8 months 10 days" element agree was under a year.

3. 3. The accession is conventionally dated to 25 June 253, following on Cornelius's death in exile that summer, and the death to 5 March 254: J. N. D. Kelly and Michael J. Walsh, The Oxford Dictionary of Popes, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), s.v. "Lucius I." The day of accession is a modern reconstruction; the death date rests on the primary evidence discussed at n. 19 below.

4. 4. Liber Pontificalis, "Lucius," in Loomis, The Book of the Popes, 28: "Lucius, by nationality a Roman, son of Purphirius." Johann Peter Kirsch, "Pope St. Lucius I," in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910), NewAdvent.org: "According to the 'Liber Pontificalis', he was Roman born, and his father's name was Porphyrius. Where the author obtained this information is not known."

5. 5. On the Decian persecution, the lapsi (distinguished as sacrificati, who sacrificed, and libellatici, who bought certificates), and the Novatian schism, see W. H. C. Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965), and Cyprian's own De lapsis. Cyprian describes Novatian's rigorist position—that "the comforts and aids of divine love... are closed to the servants of God who repent"—in Epistle 66.1 (ANF numbering), NewAdvent.org.

6. 6. Kirsch, "Pope St. Lucius I," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910): "After the death of St. Cornelius, who died in exile in the summer of 253, Lucius was chosen to fill his place, and consecrated Bishop of Rome." Cornelius's place of exile, Centumcellae (Civitavecchia), is recorded in the tradition surrounding his death.

7. 7. Kirsch, "Pope St. Lucius I," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910). The persecution under Trebonianus Gallus (with his son Volusianus) had already banished Cornelius; Lucius's return is placed at the accession of Valerian in the autumn of 253.

8. 8. The Felician recension of the Liber Pontificalis, drawing on the Liberian Catalogue: "Hic exul fuit et postea nutu Dei incolumis ad ecclesiam reversus est." Quoted in Kirsch, "Pope St. Lucius I"; cf. Loomis, The Book of the Popes, 28 ("He was in exile. Afterwards by the will of God he returned in safety to the church").

9. 9. Cyprian, Epistle 57, "To Lucius the Bishop of Rome, Returned from Banishment" (ANF/Wallis numbering) = Epistle 61 in the critical edition of Hartel (CSEL III.2), trans. Robert Ernest Wallis, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5 (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1886), NewAdvent.org. Cyprian's earlier congratulatory letter, on Lucius's election, is lost; Kirsch notes both.

10. 10. Cyprian, Epistle 57.1, trans. Wallis, ANF vol. 5: "when the divine condescension, by a double honour, appointed you in the administration of God's Church, as well a confessor as a priest"; and "your banishment was so divinely arranged, not that the bishop banished and driven away should be wanting to the Church, but that he should return to the Church greater than he had left it."

11. 11. Cyprian, Epistle 57.2, trans. Wallis, ANF vol. 5. The immediately preceding sentences invoke the three youths in the fiery furnace and Daniel in the lions' den as models of the confessor whose death was "frustrated" yet whose glory was undiminished.

12. 12. Cyprian, Epistle 57.3, trans. Wallis, ANF vol. 5. Kirsch (Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9) notes that by the "heretics" whom the persecution exposed, Cyprian "obviously means the Novatians."

13. 13. Cyprian, Epistle 57.4, trans. Wallis, ANF vol. 5. Cyprian himself was beheaded at Carthage on 14 September 258 under Valerian's persecution; he is commemorated as a martyr in the Depositio Martyrum (see n. 18).

14. 14. Cyprian, Epistle 66.5, "To Father Stephanus, Concerning Marcianus of Arles" (ANF/Wallis) = Epistle 68.5 in Hartel (CSEL), trans. Wallis, ANF vol. 5, NewAdvent.org. The Latin, "servandus est enim antecessorum nostrorum beatorum martyrum Cornelii et Lucii honor gloriosus," is quoted by Kirsch from Hartel, II, 748.

15. 15. The phrase "litteris suis signaverunt"—"they attested by their letters"—indicates a written ruling. Kirsch summarizes: "In the matter of confession and the restoration of the 'Lapsi' (fallen) Lucius adhered to the principles of Cornelius and Cyprian... Lucius, like Cornelius, had expressed his opinions in writing" (Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9).

16. 16. Kirsch, "Pope St. Lucius I," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9: "The schism of Novatian, through which he was brought forward as antipope, in opposition to Cornelius, still continued in Rome under Lucius." On Novatian's excommunication, see Cyprian, Epistle 66.2 (ANF).

17. 17. Kirsch, "Pope St. Lucius I," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910). On martys/"martyr" retaining its root sense of "witness" and extending to confessors in the third century, see the standard patristic lexica; Cyprian's usage in Epistle 57 (a "deferred" martyrdom for a living confessor) is itself an illustration.

18. 18. Depositio Martyrum, in the Chronograph of 354: "XIII kal. Feb. Fabiani in Callisti" (20 January, Pope Fabian); "VIII idus Aug. Xysti in Callisti" (6 August, Pope Sixtus II); "XVIII kal. Octob. Cypriani, Africae. Romae celebratur in Callisti" (14 September, Cyprian). Theodor Mommsen, ed., Chronica Minora, vol. 1, MGH AA 9 (Berlin, 1892); transcription at Tertullian.org. Lucius's name does not appear in this list.

19. 19. Depositio Episcoporum, in the Chronograph of 354: "III non. Mar.—Luci, in Callisti" (5 March—Lucius, in the cemetery of Callixtus). Mommsen, Chronica Minora, vol. 1; transcription at Tertullian.org. "III non. Mar." = the third day before the Nones of March = 5 March. Kirsch adds that the Martyrologium Hieronymianum gives 4 March, and suggests "perhaps Lucius died on 4 March and was buried 5 March."

20. 20. Kirsch, "Pope St. Lucius I," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910).

21. 21. Kirsch, "Pope St. Lucius I," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910): "On the excavation of the vault, de Rossi found a large fragment of the original epitaph, which only gives the pope's name in Greek: LOUKIS. The slab is broken off just behind the word, so that in all probability there was nothing else on it except the title EPISKOPOS (bishop)." On de Rossi's identification of the Crypt of the Popes (1854), see Giovanni Battista de Rossi, La Roma sotterranea cristiana, vol. 2 (Rome, 1867), 62–70.

22. 22. Liber Pontificalis, "Lucius" (Loomis, The Book of the Popes, 28): "He was crowned with martyrdom." The specific claim that he was beheaded under Valerian is reported and rejected by Kirsch (see n. 24).

23. 23. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica VII.10.3, trans. McGiffert, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 1: Valerian "had been mild and friendly toward the men of God, for none of the emperors before him had treated them so kindly and favorably." Valerian's first persecution edict is dated to 257. Available at NewAdvent.org.

24. 24. Kirsch, "Pope St. Lucius I," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910): "According to the 'Liber Pontificalis' this pope was beheaded in the time of Valerian, but this testimony cannot be admitted."

25. 25. Kirsch, "Pope St. Lucius I," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910), on the decretal ("Hic praecepit, ut duo presbyteri et tres diaconi in omni loco episcopum non desererent propter testimonium ecclesiasticum"): "The author of the 'Liber Pontificalis' has unauthorizedly ascribed to St. Lucius a decretal... Such a measure might have been necessary under certain conditions at a later period; but in Lucius's time it was incredible." On the archdeacon-Stephen story: "also a fabrication." Cf. Loomis, The Book of the Popes, 28.

26. 26. On the 1969 reform, which "omitted [Lucius's feast] from the General Roman Calendar, partly because of the baselessness of the title of 'martyr' with which he had previously been honoured," see Calendarium Romanum (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1969), 118. His feast had been inserted in the General Roman Calendar in 1602 under 4 March, and reduced to a commemoration when the feast of St. Casimir was placed on the same day in 1621.

27. 27. Martyrologium Romanum (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2001), 5 March: "Romae via Appia in coemeterio Callisti, depositio sancti Lucii, papae, qui, sancti Cornelii successor, pro Christi fide exsilium passus est et, fidei confessor eximius, in angustiis tempestatibus suis moderatione ac prudentia se gessit"—"At Rome on the Via Appia in the cemetery of Callixtus, the burial of Saint Lucius, pope, who, the successor of Saint Cornelius, suffered exile for the faith of Christ and, an outstanding confessor of the faith, conducted himself with moderation and prudence in the difficult times that were his."

28. 28. In the Depositio Episcoporum's roll of Roman bishops (from the mid-third century to 352), Lucius (d. 254) is the earliest whose deposition is recorded; the later occupants of the Crypt of the Popes include Stephen I, Sixtus II, Dionysius, Felix I, and Eutychian. On the crypt and its occupants, see the official guide of the Catacombs of St. Callixtus (catacombesancallisto.it) and de Rossi, La Roma sotterranea cristiana, vol. 2.

29. 29. Kirsch, "Pope St. Lucius I," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910): "The relics of the saint were transferred by Pope Paul I (757–767) to the church of San Silvestro in Capite, or by Pope Paschal I (817–824) to the Basilica of St. Praxedes." A parallel tradition places relics of Lucius, with those of St. Cecilia, in Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, rebuilt by Paschal I. The divergence reflects the wholesale translation of catacomb relics into the city's churches in the eighth and ninth centuries.

30. 30. A relic venerated as Lucius's skull was brought to Roskilde, Denmark, around 1100, Lucius having been made patron of the island of Zealand; it is now kept at St. Ansgar's Cathedral, Copenhagen (property of the Danish National Museum). Radiocarbon testing reported by the National Museum concluded that the skull belonged to a man who lived c. AD 340–431, roughly a century after Lucius's death in 254, and therefore cannot be his. See the account and sources collected in "Pope Lucius I," Wikipedia.