Pope Saint Marcellinus: The Twenty-Ninth Pope, the Lapse Rome Tried to Forget, and the Council That Never Met

The twenty-ninth in a series on the popes.

No pope in the first three centuries is harder to defend than Marcellinus, and the difficulty is not that the evidence against him is strong. It is that the evidence for him is missing. The bishops of Rome before him left thin dossiers—a name in Eusebius, a line in a burial calendar, a garbled paragraph in the Roman pope-book—but they left the ordinary residue of men whose memory the Church wanted to keep. Marcellinus left a hole. The one document that ought to have recorded his death and honored his tomb, the calendar the Roman Church drew up two generations later, lists every pope from Lucius I onward and skips his name alone.⁠¹ That silence is the central fact of his story, and everything else—an accusation carried across the Mediterranean by his enemies, a martyr-legend assembled to cover the wound, a forged council that made him the unlikely founder of a maxim in canon law—is the Church working out, over two hundred years, what to do with a pope it could neither quite condemn nor quite celebrate.

This is the twenty-ninth entry in my series on the popes, which has followed the bishops of Rome in order from Peter down to Marcellinus’s predecessor, Caius. Caius died in 296 after a long, quiet reign in the last calm the Roman Church would know for a decade. Marcellinus was elected on the last day of June that year.⁠² Seven years later the storm arrived, and it is impossible to tell the story of the twenty-ninth pope without telling the story of the persecution that swallowed him.

The Pope the Oldest Calendars Erased

Begin with the paper trail, because it is short and it is strange. The Liberian Catalogue—a list of the bishops of Rome compiled in 354, close enough to Marcellinus’s own century to carry weight—gives him a reign of “eight years, three months, and twenty-five days,” running “in the times of Diocletian and Maximian” from the day before the Kalends of July in 296 to the ninth consulship of Diocletian in 304, and adds the ominous coda that “in which time there was a persecution and the episcopate ceased for seven years, six months, and twenty-five days.”⁠³ That is the good source, and it is unembarrassed: Marcellinus reigned eight years, the persecution came, and after him the chair of Peter sat empty for years.

The trouble begins when one asks how the Roman Church remembered him. The same manuscript that preserves the Liberian Catalogue also preserves the two oldest liturgical calendars of the Roman Church—the Depositio Martyrum, the register of the martyrs’ burial anniversaries, and the Depositio Episcoporum, the register of the bishops’ burials. Marcellinus is in neither.⁠⁴ Nor does his name appear in the Martyrologium Hieronymianum, the earliest general martyrology of the Latin Church. This is not the ordinary silence of a poorly documented age. Every pope from Lucius I in the 250s forward is accounted for in these lists; the catacomb of Callixtus held the bodies of eleven of Marcellinus’s predecessors, several of their Greek epitaphs recovered in the nineteenth century. Marcellinus is the one gap. As the Catholic Encyclopedia puts it, weighing the pattern, “this omission is therefore not accidental, but intentional.”⁠⁵

Our earliest narrative witness is no more forthcoming. Eusebius of Caesarea, writing within a generation of these events, disposes of the whole pontificate in a single clause. Marcellinus, he says, “was overtaken by the persecution.”⁠⁶ That is all. Eusebius names no martyrdom, describes no heroism, records no death. He is a historian who never missed a chance to crown a bishop of Rome with the martyr’s palm when he could, and here, at the one moment it would have mattered most, he reaches for a phrase so studiously vague that his own nineteenth-century translator paused over it: the expression “might mean martyrdom, or might mean simply arrest.”⁠⁷ When a friendly source goes quiet at exactly the point where praise is expected, the quiet is itself a datum. Something about the end of Marcellinus’s life did not lend itself to the usual telling.

The Storm Breaks

The persecution that overtook him was the last and worst the Roman Empire launched against the Church, and it began in earnest in the year Marcellinus had reigned seven years. On 24 February 303, at Nicomedia, Diocletian promulgated the first of a series of edicts against the Christians. It ordered churches razed, forbade Christian assembly, stripped Christians of legal standing, and—the demand that would define the decade—required that the sacred books be surrendered to the magistrates and burned.⁠⁸ The handing over of the Scriptures had a name, traditio, and those who complied would be branded with a name derived from it, traditores, “handers-over,” the traitors of the faith. Further edicts followed over the next year: the clergy were imprisoned, then offered release if they would sacrifice, and finally, in an edict of early 304, the whole population was ordered to sacrifice to the gods on pain of death.⁠⁹ It was under this last and bloodiest measure that Marcellinus’s pontificate ended.

What the persecution did to the Roman Church can be measured in stone. Early in Marcellinus’s reign, before the storm, a deacon named Severus had cut a new double burial chamber in the catacomb of Callixtus “by order of his pope Marcellinus”—the ordinary business of a growing community.⁠¹⁰ Within a few years that same cemetery was confiscated, along with the other meeting-places of the Roman Christians, and when Marcellinus died he was not buried among his predecessors in the catacomb of Callixtus at all. His body went instead to the catacomb of Priscilla on the Via Salaria, near the grave of the martyr Crescentius—a private cemetery, still in Christian hands, because the official one had been seized.⁠¹¹ The confiscation is a small fact with a large implication: the machinery of the Roman Church had been broken, its property taken, its leaders scattered. Of the Roman clergy in these years we know of exactly two who were martyred, and neither was the pope—a priest named Marcellinus (a different man, easily confused with the pope) and an exorcist named Peter, who are still commemorated together in the Church’s calendar.⁠¹² The bishop and the rest of the senior clergy, in the words of the Catholic Encyclopedia, “were able to elude the persecutors.” How they eluded them is the whole question.

The Charge from Africa

The accusation, when it came, came from an unexpected quarter and a century late. It came from the Donatists.

The Donatist schism had torn the African Church after this same persecution over precisely the issue the persecution had forced: what to do about clergy who had lapsed, and specifically about bishops who had handed over the sacred books. The Donatists held the rigorist line—a traditor bishop had forfeited his office, and any sacrament he conferred was void—and they had broken communion with the Catholic Church of Africa over the consecration of a bishop of Carthage they judged tainted by traditio. To defend their separation, the Donatists needed the Catholic communion, and above all its head at Rome, to be tainted too. And so, around the year 400 and again around 410, the Donatist bishop Petilian of Constantina—the North African city of Cirta, renamed for Constantine—leveled the charge in writing: that Pope Marcellinus and three of the Roman priests who became his successors, Melchiades, Marcellus, and Sylvester, had surrendered the Scriptures and offered incense during the persecution.⁠¹³

It is a serious charge, and it deserves to be weighed at its strongest before it is weighed at its weakest. The Donatists were closer to the events than we are; they were fighting over the memory of a persecution their own fathers had lived through; and the rigorist reading of the Roman silence—that Rome hushed up a lapse it was ashamed of—is not absurd. But the charge has a fatal weakness, and it is one the Donatists’ own documents supply. When the Catholics and Donatists met at the great Conference of Carthage in 411 to settle their dispute before an imperial commissioner, the Donatists produced the official acts of the confiscation of the Roman church buildings—the closest thing to a paper record of who did what in Rome in 303. Those acts named as traitors only two Roman deacons, Straton and Cassius. They did not name the pope.⁠¹⁴ The one contemporary Roman document the Donatists could lay hands on, the document that would have convicted Marcellinus if anything could, was silent about him. Petilian asserted the pope’s guilt; he could not, in the Catholic Encyclopedia’s flat summary, “adduce any proof.”⁠¹⁵

A word of caution about names is in order here, because this era generates confusions that have misled better historians than most bloggers. The Marcellinus accused by the Donatists is the pope. He is not the Roman priest Marcellinus martyred with the exorcist Peter. And he is emphatically not Flavius Marcellinus, the imperial tribune and Augustine’s close friend, the man to whom Augustine dedicated the opening books of the City of God—for that Marcellinus was the very commissioner who presided over the Conference of Carthage in 411, the conference at which the dead pope’s reputation was dragged forward and attacked. Three men, one name, one generation. Keeping them apart is the first discipline of the subject.⁠¹⁶

Augustine for the Defense

The task of answering Petilian fell to the greatest mind the African Church ever produced, and Augustine of Hippo took it up in a series of anti-Donatist works written in the years around the Conference of Carthage. His defense of Marcellinus is instructive precisely because of what it does and does not claim.

Augustine does not stand up and testify that Marcellinus never faltered. He was in no position to; he knew no more about the inside of the Roman persecution than we do. What he does instead is put the burden of proof exactly where it belongs. In his reply to Petilian’s letters he lays down the principle that governs the whole dispute: of the bishops the Donatists accuse of handing over the books, “either you do not prove it, and it pertains to no one; or you prove it, and it does not pertain to us.”⁠¹⁷ An unproved accusation convicts no one; and even a proved one, Augustine argues throughout the Donatist controversy, would stain only the man who sinned, not the Church whose holiness does not hang on the virtue of its ministers. In the treatise he devoted specifically to Petilian’s pamphlet, he is blunter still about the accused Roman clergy: “He says they were criminals and sacrilegious; I answer that they were innocent.”⁠¹⁸

Augustine’s most telling argument, though, is historical, and it turns the Donatists’ own record against them. One of the men Petilian named as a traditor, the priest Melchiades, went on to become pope himself, and as Pope Miltiades he presided in 313 over the Roman synod that acquitted the Catholic bishop of Carthage—the very verdict the Donatists spent the next century appealing. When they appealed it, they combed the record for anything that would discredit Miltiades and his judgment. They said nothing about his having been a traditor. Had the charge been true and known, Augustine points out, they would certainly have raised it; their silence then exposes their accusation now as an afterthought.⁠¹⁹ It is a lawyer’s argument, and a good one. But notice what it establishes and what it does not. It establishes that the charge was unproven and probably manufactured. It does not establish that nothing happened. Augustine defends Marcellinus by attacking the evidence, not by producing an alibi—and on the central question of what the pope actually did in 303, even his great advocate falls back on the silence.

How a Rumor Became a Martyr

Rome, it turns out, had its own version of the story, and it ran in a direction the Donatists never anticipated. Toward the end of the fifth century someone composed a passio—a martyrdom account—of Pope Marcellinus, and though the text itself is lost, it was absorbed into the sixth-century Liber Pontificalis, the Roman Book of the Popes, where it can still be read.⁠²⁰ Its solution to the problem of Marcellinus is remarkable: it concedes the lapse and then redeems it. The pope, the account says, was led to the sacrifice “that he might scatter incense, which he did”—an admission no enemy forced from Rome, offered freely by a Roman source. But then, “after a few days he was seized with remorse,” and Diocletian condemned him to death, and he was beheaded with three other Christians, Claudius, Cyrinus, and Antoninus. His body and theirs, the legend adds, lay unburied in the street for weeks by the emperor’s order, until a priest named Marcellus—the future pope—gathered them by night and laid them in the catacomb of Priscilla.⁠²¹

The Catholic Encyclopedia reads the construction of this story with a clear eye, and its analysis is worth stating plainly: the account “attempts to combine a rumour that the pope had offered incense to the gods, with the fact that, in other circles he was regarded as a martyr and his tomb venerated.”⁠²² Two facts about Marcellinus were circulating in Rome—a whisper that he had fallen, and a cult that honored his grave as a martyr’s—and they contradicted each other. The passio is the harmonization. It grants the incense to satisfy the whisper and then wins it back with a repentance and a martyrdom to satisfy the cult. The lapse becomes the first act of a redemption story. It is a generous solution, and a human one, and there is no early evidence that any of its second half is true. What is striking is that the Roman legend, unlike the Donatist polemic, did not deny the fall. It absorbed it.

The Council That Never Met

If the passio was the pious solution, the next attempt was the audacious one, and it belongs not to hagiography but to a political brawl over the papacy itself two centuries after Marcellinus was dead.

At the opening of the sixth century the Roman Church was torn by the Laurentian schism, a disputed papal election that pitted Pope Symmachus against the antipope Laurentius from 498 to 507. Symmachus was accused of grave crimes and dragged before synods convened by the Ostrogothic king Theodoric to judge him. His partisans needed a principle, and a precedent, to establish that no synod, no king, no earthly power could sit in judgment on the bishop of Rome. So they manufactured one. Among a cluster of forged documents produced in Symmachus’s cause—the so-called Symmachan forgeries—was a set of acts purporting to record a synod held at Sinuessa, in Campania, in the year 303, to try the lapsed Pope Marcellinus.⁠²³

The forged story is a set piece. Three hundred bishops assemble. For two days Marcellinus denies the charge that he sacrificed; on the third he confesses and repents. And then the assembled bishops decline to pass sentence on him at all, “because the first see is judged by no one”—quia prima sedes non iudicatur a quoquam. The pope, in the forger’s telling, condemns himself, since no one else may.⁠²⁴ The tale had exactly the shape Symmachus’s defenders needed: a fallen pope, guiltier by far than Symmachus, whom a great council of bishops still refused to judge, on the principle that Peter’s chair has no earthly superior. That the council never met, that no such synod is known to any source before the forgery, that Sinuessa produced no acts in 303 because it produced no synod—none of this troubled the forger, and the Catholic Encyclopedia’s verdict is the verdict of every scholar who has examined the documents since: “the spuriousness of these acts is almost certain.”⁠²⁵ The forger had simply done, more boldly, what the author of the passio had done: he took the rumor of Marcellinus’s fall and made of it whatever his own moment required.

“The First See Is Judged by No One”

Here the story of an obscure fourth-century pope opens, unexpectedly, onto a thousand years of canon law—because the maxim the forger put in the mouths of his three hundred phantom bishops did not stay buried with the forgery. It escaped.

The principle that the first see is judged by no one traveled out of the Symmachan forgeries and into the great medieval collections of church law. It surfaced in the ninth-century Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals, that vast forged corpus that shaped medieval canon law, and passed from there through the collections of Burchard of Worms and Ivo of Chartres into the master text of them all, the Decretum of Gratian, compiled around 1140.⁠²⁶ Gratian gives the maxim its classic form—“no one shall judge the first see”—and, in a separate and equally consequential canon, attaches to it the qualification that would occupy canonists for centuries: the pope “is to be judged by no one, unless he be found deviating from the faith.”⁠²⁷ That exception, born in the same soil of pseudonymous law, is the distant root of the long debate over whether and how a heretical pope might be resisted or deposed—a debate that is not merely medieval, as anyone who follows contemporary theological argument can attest.

And the maxim did not stop with Gratian. It runs straight into the living law of the Church. The 1917 Code of Canon Law opened its treatment of trials with the axiom in four words—Prima Sedes a nemine iudicatur, “the first see is judged by no one”—and the current 1983 Code preserves it verbatim, at canon 1404.⁠²⁸ A phrase first written down to shield a sixth-century pope, in acts fathered on a synod that never met, to explain the case of a fourth-century pope who may have sacrificed to idols, is today a canon binding on the universal Church.

The honest conclusion to draw is a careful one. The maxim’s pedigree is a forgery, and no one who values the truth should pretend otherwise. But the principle—that the successor of Peter has no judge on earth above him—does not stand or fall with the Sinuessa acts. It was defended on other grounds long before and long after the forgery, and it was the historical synod that actually exonerated Symmachus in 502, not the fictional one that supposedly spared Marcellinus, that vindicated it in practice; the First Vatican Council gave the underlying primacy its dogmatic form in 1870 without any reliance on Sinuessa.⁠²⁹ The forgery is the vehicle, not the foundation. That distinction is the difference between apologetics and history, and a Catholic who cares about both should be the first to insist on it.

Was Marcellinus a Martyr?

Which returns us to the question the whole tradition has been circling, and on which the tradition itself has, over time, quietly changed its mind.

For most of the Middle Ages and well into the modern era, the answer was yes. The Liber Pontificalis made him a martyr; the medieval martyrologies followed it; the pre-1970 Roman Martyrology commemorated him on 26 April as “Saint Marcellinus, pope and martyr, who was beheaded for the faith of Christ, with Claudius, Cyrinus, and Antoninus.”⁠³⁰ Yet the evidence never sat easily under the title. The oldest Roman calendars, as we have seen, omit him from the martyrs and the bishops alike; Eusebius declines to call him a martyr; the modern consensus among historians, weighing that silence, is that Marcellinus almost certainly did not die a martyr and very probably lapsed in some fashion under the first edict—not necessarily the overt public sacrifice the older apologists were most concerned to deny, but some compliance or accommodation that fell short of open apostasy. The New Catholic Encyclopedia states the current scholarly judgment without flinching: historians “consider the Western evidence decisive and believe that somehow Marcellinus compromised himself during the persecution, although they also take his repentance seriously.”⁠³¹

The Church’s own liturgical books have moved in the same direction, and the movement is telling. As early as 1883 the breviary lessons that had repeated the Liber Pontificalis story of his lapse and repentance were revised.⁠³² The 1969 reform of the General Roman Calendar removed the joint feast of Cletus and Marcellinus that the thirteenth century had inserted on 26 April, citing the uncertainties surrounding both men.⁠³³ And the current Martyrologium Romanum, the Church’s official and revised roll of the saints, does not commemorate Pope Marcellinus at all—not on 26 April, not on any day. He has been quietly dropped from the martyr-list that his own legend once anchored.⁠³⁴

So is it defensible to call the twenty-ninth pope a martyr? On the best and earliest evidence, no. The honest formulation is the one the modern Church has itself adopted: Marcellinus is a saint whose martyrdom is a matter of later legend rather than early record, a pope whose conduct in the persecution the fourth-century Roman Church declined to celebrate, and whose feast the twentieth-century Roman Church declined to keep. Alban Butler, no debunker, had already granted the essential point in the eighteenth century: Marcellinus “has been styled a martyr, though his blood was not shed in the cause of religion.”⁠³⁵

The Man and the Office

It would be a mistake to end on the debunking, because the debunking is not the interesting part. The interesting part is what the Church did with a pope who failed.

Consider the alternatives it did not take. It did not, in the manner of a regime managing its founders, simply rewrite the record and issue Marcellinus a martyr’s crown by decree; the oldest calendars preserve the damning silence to this day. It did not, in the manner of its Donatist critics, conclude that a lapsed pope had voided his office and poisoned the succession that ran through him. It did something harder than either. It kept the man in the list—Marcellinus is the twenty-ninth pope, in every reckoning, his name never struck from the line—while letting the honest doubt about him stand. The rumor of his fall was never fully suppressed and never fully proven; the martyr-legend grew up beside it and the modern reforms trimmed it back; and through all of it the succession simply continued, from Caius before him to the long vacancy after him to Marcellus I, who was elected in 308 to rebuild the shattered Roman Church.

That is the theological point buried in this small and difficult biography, and Dom Prosper Guéranger stated it a century and a half ago with more economy than I can manage: the fall of Marcellinus, he wrote, “would be no argument against the infallibility of the Roman Pontiff.”⁠³⁶ The office does not depend on the virtue of the man who holds it—a principle Augustine spent the Donatist controversy defending, and a principle the case of Marcellinus tests as severely as any in the early Church. A pope may have offered incense to save his life and still have handed on, unbroken, the thing he was given to hand on. Whether Marcellinus in fact faltered we will probably never know; the evidence that convicts him is a silence, and the evidence that clears him is an advocate who could only attack the silence. What we can know is that the Church he led through the worst persecution it ever faced survived him, remembered him honestly, and left the verdict where the evidence leaves it—unsettled, and unafraid.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Pope Saint Marcellinus?

Marcellinus was the twenty-ninth pope, reigning from 296 to 304. A Roman by birth, he governed the Church through the last years of peace before the emperor Diocletian launched the “Great Persecution” in 303, and he died in 304 as that persecution raged. After his death the Roman see stood vacant for several years before Marcellus I was elected.

Did Pope Marcellinus really apostatize?

The evidence is genuinely disputed. Donatist critics in Africa charged that he handed over the Scriptures and offered incense to the gods, but they could produce no proof, and Augustine defended him. The oldest Roman calendars, however, pointedly omit him, and most modern historians read that silence as a sign that Marcellinus did lapse in some way under the persecution’s first edict—while also crediting the tradition that he repented. The Catholic Encyclopedia maintains that he committed no overt act of apostasy; the New Catholic Encyclopedia reports that scholars now think he “somehow compromised himself.” The most honest answer is that we cannot be certain.

What was the Council of Sinuessa?

It was a council that never happened. The “Acts of the Synod of Sinuessa” are a forgery, produced in the early sixth century as part of the Symmachan forgeries to defend Pope Symmachus during the Laurentian schism. In the fictional account, three hundred bishops gather to try the lapsed Marcellinus but refuse to pass sentence on him “because the first see is judged by no one.” Scholars are virtually unanimous that the acts are spurious.

What does “prima sedes a nemine iudicatur” mean, and is it still law?

The Latin phrase means “the first see is judged by no one”—that is, the pope has no judicial superior on earth. It first appears in the forged Sinuessa acts, passed through the medieval decretals into Gratian’s Decretum, and survives verbatim in the current 1983 Code of Canon Law at canon 1404. The maxim’s pedigree is a forgery, but the underlying principle of papal primacy is defended on independent grounds and was given dogmatic form at the First Vatican Council in 1870.

Is Marcellinus considered a martyr today?

Not in the Church’s current official books. The Liber Pontificalis and the pre-1970 Roman Martyrology honored him as “pope and martyr,” but the oldest evidence never supported the title, the 1969 calendar reform removed his feast, and the current Martyrologium Romanum does not commemorate him at all. He remains a traditionally venerated saint whose martyrdom is regarded as legendary.

Why is Marcellinus easy to confuse with other saints named Marcellinus?

Three men of that name cluster around this period. Pope Marcellinus (296–304) is the subject of this essay. A Roman priest named Marcellinus was martyred with the exorcist Peter in the same persecution and is still commemorated on 2 June. And Flavius Marcellinus was the imperial tribune, friend of Augustine, and dedicatee of the City of God, who presided over the Conference of Carthage in 411. They are three distinct people.

Footnotes

1. 1. Johann Peter Kirsch, "Pope St. Marcellinus," in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910): "in the Roman 'Chronograph' whose first edition was in 336, the name of this pope alone is missing, while all other popes from Lucius I onwards are forthcoming." Available at NewAdvent.org. On the eleven papal graves in the catacomb of Callixtus, see the entry on Felix I in this series.

2. 2. The Liberian Catalogue gives 30 June 296 as the day of election; the Liber Pontificalis, following it, dates the accession to the same period (its own reckoning renders it "1 July"). See Kirsch, "Pope St. Marcellinus," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910), and Louis Duchesne, ed., Le Liber Pontificalis (Paris: Thorin, 1886–1892), vol. 1, 6–7, 162–163.

3. 3. Liberian Catalogue (the "Catalogus Liberianus"), part 13 of the Chronograph of 354, in Theodor Mommsen, ed., Chronica Minora, vol. 1, MGH Auctores Antiquissimi 9 (Berlin, 1892), 73–76; Latin and English at the Tertullian Project, tertullian.org: "Marcellinus, 8 years, 3 months, 25 days. He was in the times of Diocletian and Maximian from the day before the kalends of July [296] . . . to the consulate of Diocletian for the 9th time and Maximian for the 8th [304]. In which time there was a persecution and the episcopate ceased for 7 years, 6 months and 25 days." The stated length of the vacancy is schematic and probably exaggerated; the effective interregnum before Marcellus I (elected 308) was long but shorter than seven years.

4. 4. Kirsch, "Pope St. Marcellinus," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910): "His name does not occur either in the list of martyrs or the bishops in the Roman 'Chronograph' of the year 354. Neither is he mentioned in the 'Martyrologium Hieronymianum.'" The Depositio Martyrum and Depositio Episcoporum are parts 11 and 12 of the Chronograph of 354. The "Marcellinus" that appears under 16 January in the manuscript is, as Kirsch notes, "clearly a slip of the pen for 'Marcellus'"; some scholars (Mommsen, de Smedt) proposed a copyist's omission, "but this hypothesis is not accepted." A minority of scholars read the Chronograph as listing Marcellinus among the bishops though not the martyrs; the load-bearing point, on which all agree, is his absence from the martyrs.

5. 5. Kirsch, "Pope St. Marcellinus," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910): "Then Marcellinus is lacking not only in the 'Chronograph', but also in the 'Martyrologium Hieronymianum', and in all fifth and sixth century lists of popes. This omission is therefore not accidental, but intentional."

6. 6. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica VII.32.1, trans. Arthur Cushman McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 1 (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1890): Caius "was in turn succeeded by Marcellinus, who was overtaken by the persecution." Available at NewAdvent.org. The Catholic Encyclopedia renders the same clause "the persecution also affected him."

7. 7. McGiffert, note on Historia Ecclesiastica VII.32.1, NPNF 2nd ser., vol. 1: "Tradition, although denied by many of the Fathers, says that he proved wanting in the Diocletian persecution, and this seems to have been a fact. It is also said that he afterward repented and suffered martyrdom, but that is only an invention. The expression of Eusebius in this connection is ambiguous; he simply says he was 'overtaken by the persecution,' which might mean martyrdom, or might mean simply arrest."

8. 8. On the first edict of 24 February 303 and its demand for the surrender of the Scriptures, see Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 12–13, and Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica VIII.2. The edict ordered the destruction of churches, the burning of the sacred books, and the loss of legal standing for Christians.

9. 9. On the sequence of edicts—the imprisonment of the clergy (summer 303), the offer of release to those who would sacrifice (autumn 303), and the general order to sacrifice extended to the whole population (early 304)—see Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica VIII.6, and Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 15. The precise dating of the fourth edict is debated; "early 304" is the safe formulation.

10. 10. Kirsch, "Pope St. Marcellinus," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910), reporting the epitaph of the deacon Severus (Giovanni Battista de Rossi, La Roma sotterranea cristiana, vol. 3, 46), which records that Severus laid out a double burial chamber with light-well and arched tomb "by order of his pope Marcellinus" (iussu papae sui Marcellini) before the outbreak of the persecution.

11. 11. Kirsch, "Pope St. Marcellinus," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910): "His body was interred in the Catacomb of Priscilla on the Via Salaria, near the crypt where the martyr Crescentius found his resting-place. The Catacomb of Callistus, the official burial place of the Roman Church . . . was evidently confiscated in the persecution."

12. 12. Kirsch, "Pope St. Marcellinus," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910): "In this persecution we know of only two Roman clerics who were martyred: the priest Marcellinus and the exorcist Petrus. The Roman bishop and the other members of the higher clergy . . . were able to elude the persecutors." Saints Marcellinus and Peter are commemorated on 2 June and are named in the Roman Canon of the Mass.

13. 13. Kirsch, "Pope St. Marcellinus," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910): "The Donatist Bishop Petilianus of Constantine in Africa asserted, in the letter he wrote in 400 and 410, that Marcellinus and the Roman priests Melchiades, Marcellus, and Sylvester (his three successors) had given up the sacred books, and had offered incense." Melchiades is the future Pope Miltiades (311–314); Marcellus is Marcellinus's immediate successor after the vacancy (see Marcellus I); Sylvester is Pope Sylvester I (314–335). On the Donatist schism and its origin in the question of the traditores, see W. H. C. Frend, The Donatist Church: A Movement of Protest in Roman North Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952).

14. 14. Kirsch, "Pope St. Marcellinus," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910): "In the Acts of confiscation of the church buildings at Rome, which at the great Carthaginian conference between Catholics and Donatists, were brought forward by the latter, only two Roman deacons, Straton and Cassius, were named as traitors." The Conference of Carthage met in June 411 under the imperial commissioner Flavius Marcellinus.

15. 15. Kirsch, "Pope St. Marcellinus," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910): Petilianus "could not adduce any proof."

16. 16. On Flavius Marcellinus, tribune and notarius, president of the Conference of Carthage (411), dedicatee of Augustine's De civitate Dei and De peccatorum meritis, executed at Carthage in September 413 and venerated as a martyr, see the entry "Marcellinus, Flavius" in the New Catholic Encyclopedia, and Augustine, De civitate Dei I, preface. He is not to be confused with the pope, nor with the priest-martyr Marcellinus (n. 12).

17. 17. Augustine, Contra litteras Petiliani II.92.202: "aut non probatis et ad neminem pertinet, aut probatis et ad nos non pertinet" ("either you do not prove it, and it pertains to no one; or you prove it, and it does not pertain to us"), as quoted in Kirsch, "Pope St. Marcellinus," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910). English translation of the work: The Writings against the Manichaeans and against the Donatists, trans. J. R. King, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st series, vol. 4 (Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1887). Available at NewAdvent.org.

18. 18. Augustine, De unico baptismo contra Petilianum 16.27: "Ipse scelestos et sacrilegos fuisse dicit; ego innocentes fuisse respondeo" ("He himself says they were criminals and sacrilegious; I answer that they were innocent"), as quoted in Kirsch, "Pope St. Marcellinus," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910); the CSEL 53 critical edition (ed. Michael Petschenig, Vienna, 1910) reads sceleratos, the spelling scelestos being Kirsch's. The treatise was never included in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers; no public-domain English translation exists, and the rendering here is my own.

19. 19. Augustine, De unico baptismo contra Petilianum 16.28 (CSEL 53): Miltiades, one of the accused, presided over the Roman synod that acquitted Caecilian of Carthage in 313; when the Donatists appealed that verdict, they raised nothing about Miltiades having been a traditor or having offered incense—silence Augustine treats as proof that the later charge was an invention. The argument is summarized in the entry "Marcellinus, Pope, St." in the New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. (Detroit: Gale, 2003), which cites Contra litteras Petiliani 2.202, De unico baptismo 16, and Breviculus Collationis 3.18.

20. 20. Kirsch, "Pope St. Marcellinus," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910): "The lost 'passio' of Marcellinus written towards the end of the fifth century . . . was utilized by the author of the 'Liber Pontificalis.'" The Liber Pontificalis reached its first form in the sixth century; the Marcellinus notice is edited in Duchesne, Le Liber Pontificalis, vol. 1, 162–163, and translated in Louise Ropes Loomis, The Book of the Popes (Liber Pontificalis) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1916), 40–41.

21. 21. Kirsch, "Pope St. Marcellinus," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910), summarizing the Liber Pontificalis: "he was led to the sacrifice that he might scatter incense, which he did. But after a few days he was seized with remorse, and was condemned to death by Diocletian with three other Christians, and beheaded." The companions are named Claudius, Cyrinus, and Antoninus in the Liber Pontificalis and the historical martyrologies; they are otherwise undocumented. The number of days the bodies lay unburied, and the burial date, vary among the recensions.

22. 22. Kirsch, "Pope St. Marcellinus," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910): "It is clear that this report attempts to combine a rumour that the pope had offered incense to the gods, with the fact that, in other circles he was regarded as a martyr and his tomb venerated."

23. 23. Kirsch, "Pope St. Marcellinus," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910): "At the beginning of the sixth century . . . a collection of forged documents appeared, which were manufactured in the dispute between Pope Symmachus and Laurentius. Among them are also found apocryphal Acts of an alleged synod of 300 bishops, which took place in 303 at Sinuessa (between Rome and Capua)." On the Symmachan forgeries as a whole—the Gesta synodi Sinuessanae de Marcellino, the Constitutum Silvestri, the Gesta Liberii, and the Gesta de purgatione Xysti—and their composition around 501–502 during the Laurentian schism, see George E. Demacopoulos, The Invention of Peter: Apostolic Discourse and Papal Authority in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), and Raymond Davis, The Book of Pontiffs (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1989), introduction.

24. 24. Kirsch, "Pope St. Marcellinus," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910): "On the first two days Marcellinus had denied everything, but on the third day he admitted his lapse and repented; however the synod passed no sentence on him 'quia prima sedes non judicatur a quoquam.'" The account is drawn from Karl Joseph von Hefele, Conciliengeschichte, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (Freiburg, 1873), 143–145. One recension of the Liber Pontificalis gives the number of bishops as 180 rather than 300; the discrepancy reflects distinct textual streams.

25. 25. Kirsch, "Pope St. Marcellinus," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910): "The spuriousness of these acts is almost certain." The judgment is universal across confessional lines; see Hefele, Conciliengeschichte, vol. 1, 143–145, and Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger, Fables Respecting the Popes of the Middle Ages, trans. Alfred Plummer (London: Rivingtons, 1871).

26. 26. On the transmission of the accusatorial maxim from the Symmachan forgeries and the Constitutum Silvestri through the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals, Burchard of Worms, and Ivo of Chartres into Gratian, see Salvatore Vacca, Prima sedes a nemine iudicatur: Genesi e sviluppo storico dell'assioma fino al Decreto di Graziano, Miscellanea Historiae Pontificiae 61 (Rome: Editrice Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 1993), the standard monograph on the axiom's history.

27. 27. Gratian, Decretum, C.9 q.3 c.13, rubric "Prima sedes nullius iudicio subiaceat" ("the first see is subject to no one's judgment"): "Nemo iudicabit primam sedem" ("no one shall judge the first see"), attributed to "Pope Innocent"; and Decretum D.40 c.6 (the canon "Si papa"): the pope "cunctos ipse iudicaturus a nemine est iudicandus, nisi deprehendatur a fide devius" ("is himself to judge all and to be judged by no one, unless he be found deviating from the faith"). Both in Emil Friedberg, ed., Corpus Iuris Canonici, vol. 1 (Leipzig, 1879), cols. 610 and 145–146, respectively. The heresy exception of "Si papa" became the seed of the medieval canonists' debate on the deposition of a heretical pope.

28. 28. Codex Iuris Canonici (1917), can. 1556: "Prima Sedes a nemine iudicatur"; Codex Iuris Canonici (1983), can. 1404: "Prima Sedes a nemine iudicatur" ("The First See is judged by no one"). See the 1983 Code at vatican.va. The related canon 1983 CIC can. 333 §3 provides that "there is neither appeal nor recourse against a sentence or decree of the Roman Pontiff."

29. 29. The historical synod that heard the charges against Symmachus—the "Synodus Palmaris" of 502—declined to convict him and effectively affirmed that the see of Rome lay beyond the judgment of a synod; the forged Sinuessa acts were fabricated to supply a precedent for that outcome, not the other way round. The primacy of jurisdiction of the Roman Pontiff was defined by the First Vatican Council in the constitution Pastor Aeternus (1870), without reference to the Sinuessa material. On the distinction between the sound principle and its forged vehicle, see Demacopoulos, The Invention of Peter (2013).

30. 30. The Roman Martyrology, trans. from the fourth edition (1914; repr. of the Herder English edition), 26 April: "In the same city, in the time of Maximian, St. Marcellinus, pope and martyr, who was beheaded for the faith of Christ, with Claudius, Cyrinus, and Antoninus. So great was the persecution at this time that within a month seventeen thousand Christians were crowned with martyrdom." The joint commemoration with Cletus (Anacletus) on 26 April was of medieval origin.

31. 31. "Marcellinus, Pope, St.," in the New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. (Detroit: Gale, 2003): modern scholars "consider the Western evidence decisive and believe that somehow Marcellinus compromised himself during the persecution, although they also take his repentance seriously." Compare J. N. D. Kelly and Michael J. Walsh, The Oxford Dictionary of Popes, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), s.v. "Marcellinus," which likewise treats a real lapse as probable.

32. 32. Kirsch, "Pope St. Marcellinus," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910): "The earlier Breviaries, which follow the account of the 'Liber Pontificalis' concerning his lapse and his repentance, were altered in 1883."

33. 33. Calendarium Romanum (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1969), 121: the joint feast of Cletus and Marcellinus, inserted into the General Roman Calendar in the thirteenth century, was removed in the 1969 revision because of the uncertainties surrounding both. Cletus survived, as Anacletus, in the Roman Martyrology; Marcellinus did not.

34. 34. Martyrologium Romanum, editio typica altera (Vatican City: Typis Vaticanis, 2004). Pope Marcellinus is not commemorated on 26 April—which lists Anacletus and others—or on any other day; the priest-martyr Marcellinus (with Peter the exorcist) remains at 2 June. On the omission, see also the discussion at Wikipedia, "Pope Marcellinus," citing the 2001 editio typica.

35. 35. Alban Butler, The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Other Principal Saints, 26 April, s.v. "St. Marcellinus, Pope": Marcellinus "has been styled a martyr, though his blood was not shed in the cause of religion."

36. 36. Prosper Guéranger, The Liturgical Year, Paschal Time, 26 April (trans. from the French; Dublin: James Duffy, 1871–1900): the fall of Marcellinus, even if granted, "would be no argument against the infallibility of the Roman Pontiff," since infallibility protects the pope's solemn teaching, not the private steadfastness of the man. On the distinction between infallibility and impeccability, compare the treatment of papal failings in this series' entries on Callixtus I and Marcellus I.