Pope Saint Marcellus I: The Thirtieth Pope, the Broken Church He Rebuilt, and the Mercy That Got Him Exiled

The thirtieth in a series on the popes.

There are two popes at the turn of the fourth century whose names differ by three letters, whose reigns are separated by a four-year silence, and whom the Church’s own record cannot always keep straight. Marcellinus and Marcellus. One died in 304 under a cloud of rumor that he had handed over the Scriptures and burned incense to the gods; the other died in 309, exiled from Rome for the opposite reason—for holding the line too hard against the very Christians who had done what his predecessor was accused of. Ancient chroniclers sometimes listed one and omitted the other, as if the two were a single blurred figure; a great modern historian argued that Marcellus was not really a pope at all, only a priest mistaken for one. To write about the thirtieth bishop of Rome is first to pull his name loose from the man before him.⁠¹

Pull it loose, and what emerges is one of the strangest martyrdoms-that-was-not in the whole history of the papacy. Marcellus was not killed by a persecuting emperor. By the time he took office the persecution was over; the emperor who ruled Rome had stopped it and would soon hand the Church back its confiscated property. Marcellus was destroyed, instead, by his own flock—by the fury of Christians who had fallen away and wanted back in without cost, and who rioted when the pope told them the door was open but the price was penance. The emperor exiled him not as a persecutor of the faith but as a magistrate breaking up a brawl. He died for mercy administered as discipline, in the strange interval when the Church’s deadliest enemy was no longer Rome but itself.

This is the thirtieth entry in my series on the popes, which has followed the bishops of Rome in order from Peter through the long third century. It arrives slightly out of turn: his successor, Eusebius, already has his entry, because the crisis that consumed Marcellus did not end when Marcellus died—it killed the next pope too, in almost the same words, and Pope Damasus wrote the two of them nearly identical epitaphs. Marcellus stands at the far edge of the world this series has been describing: past Callixtus and the third-century quarrels over mercy, past the martyr-popes Fabian and Sixtus II, through the worst persecution the Church had yet endured, and out the other side into a ruined peace. He is the pope of the reconstruction, and of the first bitter fight over who was allowed to help rebuild.

The Pope Behind the Confusion

To understand Marcellus one has to begin with the disaster that made his reign necessary, and that disaster centers on the man he is forever confused with: Marcellinus, the twenty-ninth pope, who reigned from 296 and died in 304.⁠² Marcellinus had the misfortune to hold the chair of Peter when the storm broke. In February of 303 the emperor Diocletian issued the first of a series of edicts opening what Christians would remember as the Great Persecution: churches were to be razed to the ground, the sacred Scriptures surrendered and burned, Christians of rank stripped of their standing, and the clergy imprisoned and pressed by every means to sacrifice to the gods.⁠³ It was the most systematic assault the Roman state ever mounted against the Church, and it caught the bishop of Rome squarely in its path.

What Marcellinus did under that pressure became one of the ugliest questions of the age. A persistent tradition held that he had failed—that he had surrendered the sacred books as a traditor, or even offered the incense as a thurificatus, to save himself. The charge traveled by hostile channels. The Donatists of Africa, who built their whole schism on the sins of the lapsed, flung it forward a century later: their bishop Petilian asserted that Marcellinus and his successors “had given up the sacred books, and had offered incense.” But, as the old Catholic Encyclopedia notes, “he could not adduce any proof,” and Saint Augustine, answering Petilian, flatly declared the accused innocent.⁠⁴ The Liber Pontificalis preserved a lurid version in which the pope did scatter the incense, then repented within days and was beheaded—an attempt, as the historian sees it, to weld the rumor of apostasy to the fact that Marcellinus was also, in some circles, venerated as a martyr.⁠⁵ A sixth-century forger went further still, manufacturing the acts of an imaginary “Council of Sinuessa,” where three hundred bishops supposedly gathered to try the pope, who confessed his lapse, and yet were made to rule that they could pass no sentence—“quia prima sedes non judicatur a quoquam,” because the first see is judged by no one. The whole apparatus was fabricated to serve a later Roman controversy; its spuriousness, the Encyclopedia concludes, “is almost certain.”⁠⁶

The sober verdict is that Marcellinus did not apostatize. “It is accepted as certain,” Kirsch writes in the Catholic Encyclopedia, “that the pope did not comply with the imperial edict by any overt act, such as the surrender of the sacred writings, or even the offering of incense before the statue of a god”; an actual apostasy by a Roman bishop would have been trumpeted by every contemporary, and Eusebius, no flatterer of failure, records none.⁠⁷ And yet a shadow clung to his memory that will not quite lift. His name is missing from the oldest Roman list of bishops, the Depositio Episcoporum of 354—a silence too pointed to be accidental. Something about the way Marcellinus met the persecution left the Roman Church uneasy enough to leave him out of its calendar of the dead.⁠⁸ Whatever the truth, the effect on his successor is what matters here: Marcellus inherited not only a persecuted Church but a demoralized one, a community that had watched its own chief pastor’s steadfastness be doubted, and that was now full of ordinary Christians who had, in fact, fallen.

A Church in Ruins

The persecution burned itself out in the West faster than in the East. Diocletian abdicated in May of 305; his edicts, savage in the eastern provinces under Galerius, were enforced unevenly in the West and had largely spent their force there within two or three years.⁠⁹ When Maxentius seized Rome in October of 306, he brought the harassment of Roman Christians to an end altogether. But peace is not the same as recovery, and the Church that emerged from the storm was, in the plain phrase of the Catholic Encyclopedia, in “the greatest confusion.” Its meeting-places and some of its burial grounds had been confiscated; its ordinary life had simply stopped; and it was crowded with the wreckage of the fallen—the “large number of weaker members who had fallen away during the long period of active persecution.”⁠¹⁰

Into that wreckage no bishop was elected for a very long time. This is the four-year silence that produces Marcellus’s confused dates. Marcellinus died in 304; peace returned to Rome in 306; and still, as Kirsch puts it, “nearly two years passed before a new Bishop of Rome was elected.” Only in 308, by the reckoning of the ancient Liberian Catalogue, did Marcellus at last enter on his office.⁠¹¹ Why the delay? The persecution itself had made an orderly election impossible while it raged, and the chaos it left behind—confiscated churches, scattered clergy, a bitterly divided laity—made one difficult even after the danger passed. The see of Peter stood empty for something close to four years, the longest vacancy the young Roman Church had yet known, and the man finally chosen to fill it walked into a ruin.

The dates themselves resist precision, and it is worth being honest about how little we securely know. The Liberian Catalogue fixes his reign to the consular year 308 and gives its length as no more than “one year, six (or seven) months, and twenty days”; the day-precise starting date of 27 May sometimes printed in modern lists is a back-calculation, not an ancient datum.⁠¹² The traditional death-date is 16 January 309, though some scholars, reading the evidence that his successor Eusebius was already consecrated in 308, place his death a little earlier still.⁠¹³ What is not in doubt is the shape of the thing: a very short reign, at most a year and a half, wedged into the narrow interval of calm between Diocletian’s storm and the civil wars that would end at the Milvian Bridge.

The Rebuilder of a Broken Church

Here is the achievement that ought to be Marcellus’s monument, and it is the one solid, unlegendary thing the Liber Pontificalis remembers about him. Faced with a Church whose institutional life had been shattered, Marcellus rebuilt it—not by grand gesture but by administration, the least glamorous and most durable form of leadership. According to the Book of the Popes, he “divided the territorial administration of the Church into twenty-five districts (tituli), appointing over each a presbyter, who saw to the preparation of the catechumens for baptism and directed the performance of public penances.” The presbyter of each district was also made responsible for the burial of the dead and for the annual celebrations at the martyrs’ tombs.⁠¹⁴ Alongside the tituli he laid out a new burial ground on the Via Salaria, the Coemeterium Novellae, opposite the ancient Catacomb of Priscilla, to replace the cemeteries the state had seized.⁠¹⁵

The Latin of the source is worth pausing over, because it names the reconstruction’s purpose exactly: the twenty-five tituli were established “quasi diœcesis propter baptismum et pœnitentiam multorum qui convertebantur ex paganis et propter sepulturas martyrum”—as jurisdictions, for the baptism and penance of the many who were converting from paganism, and for the burial of the martyrs.⁠¹⁶ Baptism, penance, burial: the three points at which a scattered Church touches an individual life, reorganized under responsible clergy at the precise moment the Church most needed to gather itself. The old Encyclopedia is properly cautious that the round number twenty-five may reflect the state of Rome a bit later—there were about twenty-five titular churches by the early seventh century—but it does not doubt the substance: “there is still a clear historical tradition in support of his declaration that the ecclesiastical administration in Rome was reorganized by this pope after the great persecution.”⁠¹⁷ Whatever the exact count, Marcellus is the pope who put the parish skeleton back into the Roman body.

There is a doctrinal point folded inside the administrative one, and it is easy to miss. When Marcellus set a presbyter over each district and charged him, among other things, with “the performance of public penances,” he was arranging on the ground the very structure the Church would later articulate as principle: that the reconciliation of sinners belongs first to the bishop and is exercised through the priests who collaborate with him. The Catechism states it in words that could be a caption for Marcellus’s reform: “the bishop, visible head of a particular Church, has thus rightfully been considered to be the one who principally has the power and ministry of reconciliation: he is the moderator of the penitential discipline. Priests, his collaborators, exercise it to the extent that they have received the commission.”⁠¹⁸ That is nearly a job description for Marcellus’s twenty-five presbyters. He was building, brick by administrative brick, the machinery of penance—at the exact moment the crisis of penance was about to detonate under him.

The Crisis of the Lapsed

The machinery detonated because it was asked to do the one thing that tears a wounded community apart: decide who gets back in, and on what terms. The Church emerging from persecution was full of the lapsi, the fallen, and they came in grades the age had learned to distinguish precisely—the sacrificati, who had actually offered sacrifice to the idols; the thurificati, who had burned incense before the statues; the libellatici, who had bribed their way to a certificate of sacrifice they never performed; and, new to the Diocletianic persecution, the traditores, the clergy who had handed over the sacred books.⁠¹⁹ Many of these had fallen under real torture, and now, with the danger past, they wanted to come home. The question was whether the Church would make them earn it.

This was not a new fight. The Church had been through it once already, two generations earlier, in the aftermath of the Decian persecution—a crisis this series has already traced in the reign of Cornelius. Then the rigorist priest Novatian had set himself up as a rival pope precisely by refusing, unconditionally, to readmit any who had lapsed; against him, Cornelius and the mainstream of the Church held the moderate middle—the fallen may return, but only after genuine penance.⁠²⁰ Marcellus inherited Cornelius’s principle whole. But he inherited it in a harsher key, and with the sides reversed. Cornelius had been attacked from the right, by a rigorist who wanted the door shut forever. Marcellus was attacked from the left, by a lax faction that wanted the door flung open with no penance at all. In both cases the pope stood in the same place—penance, then readmission—and in both cases the papacy paid for it.⁠²¹

The papacy paid more dearly this time. When Marcellus insisted that the lapsed perform “the prescribed penance for their guilt,” a faction of the fallen, in the Catholic Encyclopedia’s paraphrase of Damasus, “violently demanded that they should be readmitted to communion without doing penance.” The truth-telling shepherd, for saying the one thing they did not want to hear, “was looked upon as a wicked enemy by all the lapsed.” Conflict followed, “some of which ended in bloodshed, and every bond of peace was broken.” At the head of the rebellion, Damasus says, stood “an apostate who had denied the Faith even before the outbreak of persecution”—a man who had not fallen under torture but abandoned Christ in peacetime, and who now led the demand that no one be made to weep for anything.⁠²²

Who was he? Damasus does not say. The poem names no one, calling him only “another” who “denied Christ in the time of peace.” Older reference works fill the blank confidently: the Catholic Encyclopedia’s article on the lapsed identifies this leader as a certain Heraclius, and treats the disorder under Marcellus and the disorder under Eusebius as one continuous conflict under one continuous instigator.⁠²³ The identification is attractive—Heraclius is the man Damasus names as the villain in his epitaph for Eusebius, Marcellus’s immediate successor, and the two crises are plainly the same crisis. But it is an inference, not a record. As the editors of Oxford’s Cult of Saints database put it, the identity of Marcellus’s unnamed opponent “is not known,” and equating him with Heraclius, however plausible, “is inevitably speculative.”⁠²⁴ What the sources give us with certainty is not the man’s name but the shape of his error: he wanted mercy without penance, absolution without the labor of return, and he was willing to shed blood in the streets of Rome to get it.

That is worth dwelling on, because it inverts the usual modern instinct about which side is the merciful one. The faction demanding instant readmission looks, at first glance, like the party of compassion, and Marcellus like a hard man. The Church’s judgment is the reverse. The point of penance was never to keep sinners out; it was to let them truly back in—to make the reconciliation real rather than notional, a healing rather than a formality. The Catechism preserves the ancient conviction that reconciliation after grave sin is a genuine second chance, “a laborious kind of baptism,” a labor precisely because it restores something that was really lost.⁠²⁵ Marcellus was not refusing the fallen. He was refusing to pretend their fall had not happened. And for that refusal he was driven out of Rome.

The Poem on the Stone

Almost everything reliable that we know about Marcellus’s downfall comes from eight lines of Latin verse. Two generations after his death, Pope Damasus—the great impresario of the Roman martyr-cult, who combed the catacombs and set elegant epigrams over the tombs of his predecessors—composed an epitaph for Marcellus and had it carved in the distinctive Philocalian lettering over his grave in the cemetery of Priscilla. The stone itself is lost; the poem survives only because medieval pilgrims copied the inscriptions of Rome into manuscript anthologies before the shrines decayed. In the standard modern edition and translation of Dennis Trout, it reads:⁠²⁶

Because the bishop, truthful, demanded the lapsed lament their faults, he was a bitter enemy to all the wretched. Hence fury, hence hatred follow, discord, quarrels, sedition, slaughter, the bonds of peace dissolve. Through the accusation of another, who in the time of peace denied Christ, he was driven from the borders of his homeland by the tyrant’s savagery. These things that he uncovered, Damasus wished to relate in brief so that the people may recognize the merit of Marcellus.

Every load-bearing fact of the reign is compressed into those lines. Veridicus rector—the truthful bishop—is the whole of Marcellus’s character: he told the fallen the truth they did not want, that they must weep for what they had done. The catalogue of consequences is a drumbeat of civil breakdown: furor, odium, discordia, lites, seditio, caedes—fury, hatred, discord, quarrels, sedition, slaughter. The villain is an unnamed alter who “denied Christ in peace.” And the sentence is exile: finibus expulsus patriae est feritate tyranni—driven from the borders of his homeland by the savagery of the tyrant, who is Maxentius.⁠²⁷

Two things about the poem deserve emphasis, because later ages got both wrong. The first is what Damasus does not say. He does not call Marcellus a martyr. He describes an exile and a death away from home, and he closes not with a crown but with a modest request—Marcelli ut populus meritum cognoscere possit, “so that the people may recognize the merit of Marcellus.” The word is meritum, merit, not martyrium. Damasus, who never missed a chance to gild a martyr, here reaches only for the quieter honor of a confessor who suffered for the truth.⁠²⁸ The second is how eerily this poem anticipates its twin. When the same crisis destroyed the next pope, Damasus wrote Eusebius an epitaph so similar that scholars call the two near-identical—the same seditio and caedes, the same foedera pacis dissolving, the same feritate tyranni driving a bishop into exile. “The two poems resemble each other closely,” Oxford’s editors note, “with identical or near-identical wording in several places,” because Damasus “saw them as holding the same office and dealing with the same situation.” Change the names and it is one poem, because it was one storm.⁠²⁹

The Legend of the Stable

Damasus’s restraint did not survive. Within a century or so a very different Marcellus took shape in the popular imagination—a full-blown martyr with a vivid and terrible death—and it is this legendary Marcellus, not the confessor of the epitaph, whom most later centuries venerated. The story comes from a fifth-century Passio, an “epic” martyrdom whose author, as modern scholars observe, “seems to have known virtually nothing about the historical Marcellus” and shows no awareness of Damasus’s poem at all.⁠³⁰ But it is a marvelous story, and it stuck.

In the legend Maxentius, unable to make the pope renounce his office or sacrifice to the gods, condemned him to the most degrading labor the imperial machine could devise: service in the catabulum, the public post-station where the horses of the state courier system were stabled. The pope of Rome was set to shoveling out the imperial stables. His clergy freed him after nine months, and a matron named Lucina sheltered him and had her house consecrated as a church in his name; but Maxentius, learning of it, had that very church filled with animals and sent Marcellus back to tend them, and there, in the reeking dark among the beasts, in a hair shirt, the pope died. The Catholic Encyclopedia relates the tale and then delivers its judgment without flinching: “All this is probably legendary, the reference to the restoration of ecclesiastical activity by Marcellus alone having an historical basis. The tradition related in the verses of Damasus seems much more worthy of belief.”⁠³¹

The legend is not without a strange afterlife of its own. It gave Marcellus his odd patronage—of grooms and stable-hands and those who work with horses—and it fastened his memory to a specific Roman church. The titulus Marcelli, attested by name in the acts of a Roman synod at the end of the fifth century, became the church of San Marcello al Corso, on the ancient Via Lata, traditionally identified both with the site of the imperial stables and with the house where Lucina had sheltered him; his relics rest there still.⁠³² It is a fitting irony that the one church in Rome that carries his name commemorates not the reform that was his real work but the stable that was his legendary death. The historical Marcellus reorganized the Roman clergy into twenty-five districts; the remembered Marcellus mucked out a stable in a hair shirt. The Church kept the more dramatic memory and quietly let the greater achievement recede.

Martyr or Confessor?

Was he a martyr? For most of the Church’s history the answer was an unhesitating yes. The traditional calendar kept 16 January as the feast of “Saint Marcellus, Pope and Martyr,” in the red vestments of the martyrs, on the strength of the Passio and its catabulum death.⁠³³ But the evidence will not quite bear the crown, and for a reason that is theological as much as historical. A martyr, strictly, is one who is killed for the faith—put to death by a power demanding apostasy. Marcellus was not. Maxentius was not persecuting Christianity; he had ended the persecution, and he would shortly restore to the Roman Church the very property the state had confiscated.⁠³⁴ When he removed Marcellus he was not attacking the faith but suppressing a riot—a riot of Christians against Christians, over the terms of their own reconciliation. Marcellus suffered exile and death not at the hands of a pagan state demanding he deny Christ, but as the casualty of a public disorder his own discipline had provoked. That is the death of a confessor, not a martyr.

The modern Church has quietly said so. When the Roman Martyrology was revised after the Second Vatican Council, the entry for 16 January was rewritten to follow Damasus rather than the Passio. The current Martyrologium commemorates Marcellus in the cemetery of Priscilla as a pope who, “as attested by Saint Damasus, true shepherd, fiercely opposed by apostates who refused the penance established by him and dishonourably denounced to the tyrant, died in exile expelled from the homeland.” It narrates the exile; it does not narrate a martyrdom; and it gives him the title of pope, not of martyr.⁠³⁵ The reform did to Marcellus what it did to his neighbor Felix I—it set aside a legendary martyr’s crown and restored the older, humbler, truer record. He remains a saint, venerated on the day the fourth-century calendar assigned him. He is simply no longer called a martyr, because the best evidence never called him one.⁠³⁶

None of which diminishes him. If anything it sharpens what he was for. Marcellus died defending a principle that the Church would vindicate within a generation, at the highest possible level. When the whole Church assembled at Nicaea in 325, among its canons were several that settled, for good, the exact question that had killed him: the lapsed could be reconciled, but through a graded, serious penance—so many years as hearers, so many as prostrators, before return to the altar—and no rigorist could bar the door forever, for even the dying penitent, one canon ruled, “must not be deprived of the last and most indispensable Viaticum.”⁠³⁷ That is Marcellus’s position, made into the law of the universal Church. He held it in Rome at the cost of his see and his life; Nicaea held it for all Christendom with the authority of an ecumenical council. The mob that drove him out lost. The pope they exiled was right.

What We Can Actually Say

Reduce Marcellus to what the evidence will bear, and the portrait is spare but genuine. A Roman, elected bishop of Rome in 308 after the see had stood nearly four years empty; the pope who found the Church wrecked by the Great Persecution and rebuilt its administration, dividing the city into twenty-five districts under responsible presbyters for baptism, penance, and burial; the pope who insisted, against a violent faction of the lapsed, that the fallen must do penance before returning to communion; who for that insistence was denounced to Maxentius by an apostate and exiled from Rome; and who died away from his city, on or about 16 January 309, and was buried in the cemetery of Priscilla, where two generations later Pope Damasus set a poem over his grave asking only that the people know his merit. Every clause of that can be documented, and none of it requires the stable.⁠³⁸

What the evidence will not bear is most of what made him famous: the martyrdom in the catabulum, the hair shirt, the church filled with animals, the whole vivid Passio that a fifth-century hagiographer built on a foundation of almost nothing. Strip it away and Marcellus loses his drama but keeps his dignity. He is not the pope who died shoveling a stable; he is the pope who, handed the rubble of a persecuted Church, put it back together—and who, when the reconstruction reached the hardest question of all, refused to buy peace by cheapening it. He would not tell people who had denied Christ that their denial cost nothing. He told them it could be undone, but only truthfully, only through the labor of penance, and he was willing to be driven out of Rome rather than lie to them about the price of coming home.

That is a smaller thing than a martyrdom, and a larger one. Anyone can hold a line against an enemy. Marcellus held it against his own—against the wounded and the frightened and the guilty of his own flock, who wanted their shepherd to say the easy thing, and who turned on him when he would not. He is the confessor of an unglamorous virtue: the refusal to confuse mercy with permission. The Church he rebuilt outlived Maxentius and the mob and the forgers and the legend-makers; the discipline he died for became the settled mind of Christendom at Nicaea. He asked, through Damasus, only that the people might know his merit. Seventeen centuries later, with the stable set aside and the record restored, it is finally possible to.

Next in the series: Pope Saint Eusebius, the thirty-first pope.

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). The one reliable primary source for Marcellus is the epitaph of Pope Damasus, edited, translated, and annotated in 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), and the poem, with full apparatus and an English rendering, is treated in the University of Oxford’s Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity database. The biographical notice, legend included, is in the Liber Pontificalis: Louise Ropes Loomis, The Book of the Popes (Columbia University Press, 1916), and Raymond Davis, The Book of Pontiffs, Translated Texts for Historians (Liverpool University Press, rev. ed. 2000), with the great critical edition of Louis Duchesne, Le Liber Pontificalis (Paris, 1886–1892), for the notes. On the crisis of the lapsed and the Diocletianic persecution, see W. H. C. Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church (Blackwell, 1965). The relevant articles of the old Catholic Encyclopedia—“Pope St. Marcellus I,” “Pope St. Marcellinus,” “Lapsi,” and “Maxentius”—remain a serviceable and public entry point.

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, Saint Felix I, the twenty-sixth pope, Saint Eutychian, the twenty-seventh pope, Saint Caius, the twenty-eighth pope, and Saint Marcellinus, the twenty-ninth pope.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Pope Saint Marcellus I?

Marcellus I was the thirtieth Bishop of Rome, counting Peter as first, reigning from 308 until his death on 16 January 309. He was elected after the see had stood empty for nearly four years, in the aftermath of the Great Persecution of Diocletian. He is remembered for two things above all: reorganizing the shattered Roman Church into twenty-five administrative districts, the tituli, each under a presbyter charged with baptism and penance; and being exiled by the emperor Maxentius after his strict insistence that lapsed Christians do penance before readmission provoked violent rioting in Rome. He died in exile and was venerated as a saint.

Was Marcellus I really a martyr?

Not in the strict sense. For centuries he was venerated as “Pope and Martyr” on the strength of a legendary fifth-century account in which the emperor condemned him to labor and die in the imperial stables (the catabulum). But the earliest and most reliable witness—a verse epitaph by Pope Damasus set over his tomb—says only that he was driven into exile “by the tyrant’s savagery” and died away from Rome, and it never calls him a martyr. Because Maxentius was not persecuting the faith but suppressing a riot, Marcellus is best understood as a confessor who died in exile rather than a martyr. The modern Roman Martyrology reflects this: it commemorates his death in exile and titles him pope, not martyr.

What is the difference between Marcellus I and Marcellinus?

They are two different popes, adjacent in the list and constantly confused. Marcellinus was the twenty-ninth pope (296–304), who held office when the Great Persecution began and whose memory was clouded by rumors—probably false—that he had handed over the Scriptures or offered incense under pressure. Marcellus I was the thirtieth pope (308–309), elected after the long vacancy that followed Marcellinus’s death, and remembered for rebuilding the Church and for his hard line on the lapsed. The similarity of their names caused such confusion that some ancient lists include only one of the two, and one modern scholar even argued that Marcellus was not a separate pope at all—a view that has found no support.

What were the “tituli” that Marcellus organized?

The tituli were the territorial districts—the ancestors of the modern parish—into which Marcellus, according to the Liber Pontificalis, divided the city of Rome. He established twenty-five of them, each under a presbyter responsible for preparing catechumens for baptism, directing the public penance of returning Christians, and overseeing burials and the commemorations at the martyrs’ tombs. It was a work of reconstruction: the persecution had shattered the ordinary life of the Roman Church, and Marcellus rebuilt its administrative structure at exactly the moment the flood of returning lapsed most needed clergy to guide them. The tituli are the reason Marcellus, more than any dramatic legend, deserves to be remembered.

Why was Marcellus I exiled?

He was exiled because his insistence that the lapsed do penance before returning to communion provoked a violent backlash. A faction of the fallen, led by an apostate who had denied Christ even before the persecution, demanded to be readmitted without penance; when Marcellus refused, the dispute turned into rioting and bloodshed in the streets of Rome. The emperor Maxentius, who ruled Rome and had already ended the persecution of Christians, exiled the pope not as an enemy of the faith but as a magistrate restoring public order. Marcellus died shortly after leaving Rome. The whole episode is recorded in Pope Damasus’s epitaph, which blames the disorder on the lapsed and their apostate leader, not on the pope.

Where is Pope Marcellus I buried?

He was buried in the cemetery of Priscilla on the Via Salaria, in the basilica of Saint Silvester, where Pope Damasus later set a verse epitaph over his grave. The inscribed stone is long lost; the poem survives only because medieval pilgrims copied it into manuscript anthologies of Roman inscriptions. By later tradition his relics were translated into the city to the church of San Marcello al Corso, on the ancient Via Lata—the church that carries his name and that legend associates both with the imperial stables of his supposed martyrdom and with the house of the matron Lucina who sheltered him.

Footnotes

1. 1. On the confusion of the two names, and the omission of one or the other from ancient episcopal lists, see the note in Louise Ropes Loomis, The Book of the Popes (Liber Pontificalis) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1916), 39: "Eusebius, Jerome, Augustine and the authors of the Roman Index and other early lists omit either Marcellus or Marcellinus from their chronologies. There was evidently some tendency to confuse the similar names." The view that Marcellus was not a true pope but a presbyter administering the see during the vacancy is Theodor Mommsen's; see his prolegomena to the Liber Pontificalis (MGH, 1898), and the summary in the Oxford Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity database, record E07191; Kirsch, "Pope St. Marcellus I," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910), notes that the hypothesis "has, however, found no support."

2. 2. Johann Peter Kirsch, "Pope St. Marcellinus," in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910), NewAdvent.org. Marcellinus was elected 30 June 296 and died in 304; the Liber Pontificalis gives a burial date of 26 April, which the Encyclopedia judges "wrongly placed," the death itself falling later in the year.

3. 3. On the edicts of 303, see Thomas Scannell, "Diocletian," in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 5 (1909), NewAdvent.org, quoting Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica VIII.2: the first edict ordered "to tear down the churches to the foundations and to destroy the Sacred Scriptures by fire," with the degradation of Christians of rank; three further edicts of 303–304 imprisoned the clergy and sought to compel them to sacrifice. The precise date of the first general edict is 24 February 303 (Lactantius, De Mortibus Persecutorum 13).

4. 4. Kirsch, "Pope St. Marcellinus," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910): the Donatist Petilian asserted that Marcellinus and his successors "had given up the sacred books, and had offered incense. But he could not adduce any proof." Augustine answered him that the accused were innocent (Contra litteras Petiliani II.202; De unico baptismo contra Petilianum 16). The acts of confiscation produced at the Conference of Carthage named only two Roman deacons, "Straton and Cassius," as traditores—not the pope.

5. 5. Kirsch, "Pope St. Marcellinus," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910), on the Liber Pontificalis biography, which "probably alludes to a lost 'passio'": Marcellinus "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"—a narrative combining the rumor of the lapse with his veneration in some circles as a martyr.

6. 6. Kirsch, "Pope St. Marcellinus," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910): the forged acts of an "alleged synod of 300 bishops, which took place in 303 at Sinuessa," in which Marcellinus admitted his lapse but the synod "passed no sentence on him 'quia prima sedes non judicatur a quoquam'." The documents were "manufactured in the dispute between Pope Symmachus and Laurentius" at the beginning of the sixth century; "the spuriousness of these acts is almost certain." The maxim prima sedes a nemine iudicatur—the first see is judged by no one—is the forgery's whole purpose. The story attaches to Marcellinus, not Marcellus.

7. 7. Kirsch, "Pope St. Marcellinus," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910): "It is accepted as certain that the pope did not comply with the imperial edict by any overt act, such as the surrender of the sacred writings, or even the offering of incense before the statue of a god. Such an apostasy of a Roman bishop would without a doubt have been given the greatest prominence by contemporary authors."

8. 8. The absence of Marcellinus's name from the Depositio Episcoporum and the Roman "Chronograph" is discussed by Kirsch, "Pope St. Marcellinus," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910), who calls the omission "not accidental, but intentional." The Depositio Episcoporum is preserved in the Chronograph of 354; ed. Theodor Mommsen, Chronica Minora, vol. 1, MGH Auctores Antiquissimi 9 (Berlin, 1892).

9. 9. Scannell, "Diocletian," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 5 (1909): "The abdication of Diocletian (1 May, 305) and the subsequent partition of the empire brought relief to many provinces. In the East, however, where Galerius and Maximin held sway, the persecution continued to rage." On the milder and uneven enforcement in the West, see Lactantius, De Mortibus Persecutorum 15, trans. William Fletcher, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7 (1886), NewAdvent.org.

10. 10. Johann Peter Kirsch, "Pope St. Marcellus I," in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910), NewAdvent.org: "At Rome, Marcellus found the Church in the greatest confusion. The meeting-places and some of the burial-places of the faithful had been confiscated, and the ordinary life and activity of the Church was interrupted."

11. 11. Kirsch, "Pope St. Marcellus I," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910): "elected pope in May or June, 308; died in 309"; and "after the abdication of Diocletian in 305, and the accession in Rome of Maxentius to the throne of the Caesars in October of the following year, the Christians of the capital again enjoyed comparative peace. Nevertheless, nearly two years passed before a new Bishop of Rome was elected. Then in 308, according to the 'Catalogus Liberianus', Pope Marcellus first entered on his office."

12. 12. The Liberian Catalogue's consular formula ("A cons. Maximiano Herculio X et Maximiano Galerio VII [308] usque post cons.…") fixes only the year 308 and a reign-length of "one year, six (or seven) months, and twenty days"; Kirsch, "Pope St. Marcellus I," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910). The day-precise "27 May 308" occasionally given in modern lists (e.g. some editions of the Annuario Pontificio) is a later reckoning, not an ancient datum.

13. 13. The traditional death-date is 16 January 309 (see n. 33, n. 35). The Oxford Cult of Saints database, record E07191, following Raymond Davis, "Pre-Constantinian Chronology: The Roman Bishopric from AD 258 to 314," Journal of Theological Studies 48 (1997): 439–470, notes that Marcellus "died in exile, presumably by the time his successor Eusebius was consecrated in 308," and that his consecration may fall as early as the reign of Maxentius's predecessor Severus (305–306). The evidence, in short, is "fragmentary and conflicting."

14. 14. Kirsch, "Pope St. Marcellus I," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910), paraphrasing the Liber Pontificalis (ed. Duchesne, I, 164): "Marcellus divided the territorial administration of the Church into twenty-five districts (tituli), appointing over each a presbyter, who saw to the preparation of the catechumens for baptism and directed the performance of public penances. The presbyter was also made responsible for the burial of the dead and for the celebrations commemorating the deaths of the martyrs." Cf. Loomis, The Book of the Popes, 37–38.

15. 15. Kirsch, "Pope St. Marcellus I," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910): "The pope also had a new burial-place, the Cœmeterium Novellæ on the Via Salaria (opposite the Catacomb of St. Priscilla), laid out." On the identification of the Coemeterium Novellae and the anachronistic insertion of "Priscilla" as the name of a matron in some manuscripts of the Liber Pontificalis, see Loomis, The Book of the Popes, 38 n., citing G. B. de Rossi.

16. 16. Liber Pontificalis (ed. Duchesne, I, 164), quoted in Kirsch, "Pope St. Marcellus I," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910): "Hic fecit cymiterium Novellae via Salaria et XXV titulos in urbe Roma constituit quasi diœcesis propter baptismum et pœnitentiam multorum qui convertebantur ex paganis et propter sepulturas martyrum." Translation mine.

17. 17. Kirsch, "Pope St. Marcellus I," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910): "At the beginning of the seventh century there were probably twenty-five titular churches in Rome; even granting that, perhaps, the compiler of the 'Liber Pontificalis' referred this number to the time of Marcellus, there is still a clear historical tradition in support of his declaration that the ecclesiastical administration in Rome was reorganized by this pope after the great persecution."

18. 18. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), §1462, vatican.va. Cf. §1461: "bishops who are their successors, and priests, the bishops' collaborators, continue to exercise this ministry."

19. 19. Johann Peter Kirsch, "Lapsi," in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910), NewAdvent.org: "sacrificati, those who had actually offered a sacrifice to the idols; thurificati, those who had burnt incense on the altar before the statues of the gods; libellatici, those who had drawn up attestation (libellus)… without, however, having actually done so." On the Diocletianic addition: "In the Diocletian persecution appeared a new category of lapsi called the traditores: these were the Christians (mostly clerics) who, in obedience to an edict, gave up the sacred books to the authorities."

20. 20. Kirsch, "Lapsi," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910): "When, after the election of St. Cornelius to the Chair of Peter, the Roman priest Novatian set himself up at Rome as the antipope, he claimed to be the upholder of strict discipline, inasmuch as he refused unconditionally to readmit to communion with the Church any who had fallen away. He was the founder of Novatianism." For the fuller treatment see the entry on Pope Saint Cornelius in this series.

21. 21. The inversion is the point: under Cornelius (251) the schism came from the rigorist right (Novatian, who would readmit no one); under Marcellus (308) the disorder came from the lax left (a faction demanding readmission without penance). In both the pope held the same middle ground—penance, then reconciliation. See Kirsch, "Lapsi," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910), which treats the two crises in sequence.

22. 22. Kirsch, "Pope St. Marcellus I," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910), summarizing the Liber Pontificalis and the epitaph of Damasus: the lapsed, "under the leadership of an apostate, violently demanded that they should be readmitted to communion without doing penance"; Damasus "relates that the truth-loving leader of the Roman Church was looked upon as a wicked enemy by all the lapsed, because he insisted that they should perform the prescribed penance for their guilt. As a result serious conflicts arose, some of which ended in bloodshed, and every bond of peace was broken. At the head of this band of the unfaithful and rebellious stood an apostate who had denied the Faith even before the outbreak of persecution."

23. 23. Kirsch, "Lapsi," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910): "the lapsi in Rome, under the leadership of a certain Hericlius, tried forcibly to obtain readmission to communion with the Church without performing penance, but Popes Marcellus and Eusebius adhered strictly to the traditional penitential discipline. The confusion and disputes… caused Maxentius to banish Marcellus and later Eusebius and Heraclius." The article treats the two pontificates as a single continuous struggle under one instigator.

24. 24. Oxford Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity, record E07191 (David Lambert): "The identity of Marcellus' unnamed opponent is not known; identifying him with Heraclius, the opponent of Pope Eusebius in Epigram 18 (as by Davis 1997, 468, n. 87), is plausible but inevitably speculative." Heraclius is named in Damasus's epitaph for Eusebius; see the entry on Pope Saint Eusebius in this series.

25. 25. Catechism of the Catholic Church, §980, vatican.va, quoting the Fathers: "Penance has rightly been called by the holy Fathers 'a laborious kind of baptism.'" Cf. §1446, which calls the sacrament "the second plank [of salvation] after the shipwreck which is the loss of grace" (citing Tertullian, De paenitentia 4, 2), and §979, that the Church "must be able to forgive all penitents their offenses, even if they should sin until the last moment of their lives."

26. 26. Damasus, Epigrammata 40 (Ferrua no. 40; ICVR IX, 24830), trans. Dennis Trout, Damasus of Rome: The Epigraphic Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 157–158, as reproduced in the Oxford Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity database, record E07191. The epitaph survives only through the medieval manuscript syllogae (the Turonensis, Laureshamensis IV, and Virdunensis collections); the inscribed stone from the basilica of Silvester in the cemetery of Priscilla is lost.

27. 27. The Latin (Ferrua no. 40): "Veridicus rector lapsos quia crimina flere / praedixit, miseris fuit omnibus hostis amarus. / Hinc furor hinc odium; sequitur discordia, lites, / seditio, caedes; solvuntur foedera pacis. / Crimen ob alterius, Christum qui in pace negavit, / finibus expulsus patriae est feritate tyranni. / Haec breviter Damasus voluit comperta referre, / Marcelli ut populus meritum cognoscere possit." The "tyrant" is Maxentius; the identification is editorial, as the poem gives only tyranni.

28. 28. The closing line, "Marcelli ut populus meritum cognoscere possit," asks that the people know Marcellus's meritum (merit), not his martyrium. The Oxford Cult of Saints database classifies Marcellus, on the strength of the poem, as a "bishop and confessor of Rome," not a martyr; record E07191.

29. 29. Oxford Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity, record E07191: "A similar chain of events is depicted in Damasus' poem on Marcellus' successor Eusebius (E07167), and the two poems resemble each other closely, with identical or near-identical wording in several places… The close resemblance between the poems on Marcellus and Eusebius implies that he saw them as holding the same office and dealing with the same situation." Damasus's epitaph for Eusebius is Epigrammata 18; both are edited in Trout, Damasus of Rome, and in Antonio Ferrua, Epigrammata Damasiana (Rome: Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana, 1942).

30. 30. The Passio Marcelli is an "epic" martyrdom of the fifth or early sixth century; the Oxford Cult of Saints database, record E07191, observes that its author "seems to have known virtually nothing about the historical Marcellus, and shows no knowledge of Damasus' poem or the events narrated in it" (cf. record E02501 for the Passio itself).

31. 31. Kirsch, "Pope St. Marcellus I," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910): the Passio holds that Marcellus "was condemned to work as a slave at a station on the public highway (catabulum)," was freed after nine months by the clergy, sheltered by "a matron named Lucina" whose house he consecrated as the titulus Marcelli, then condemned again "to the work of attending to the horses brought into the station, in which menial occupation he died. All this is probably legendary, the reference to the restoration of ecclesiastical activity by Marcellus alone having an historical basis. The tradition related in the verses of Damasus seems much more worthy of belief." Cf. Loomis, The Book of the Popes, 38, with the translator's note that "the story of the sufferings of Marcellus cannot be corroborated from other sources."

32. 32. The titulus Marcelli is attested by name among the Roman title-churches in the acts of the synod of 499; it is the church of San Marcello al Corso, on the Via del Corso (the ancient Via Lata), traditionally associated both with the catabulum of the legend and with the house of the matron Lucina. Marcellus's relics are venerated there. The association of Lucina's house with a church is variously reported; Loomis, The Book of the Popes, 38 n., connects it instead with San Lorenzo in Lucina.

33. 33. On the traditional feast of 16 January, kept as "St. Marcellus I, Pope and Martyr" in red vestments in the pre-1970 Roman calendar, and its dependence on the Passio, see the entry in the older Roman Martyrology and the propers of the Tridentine Mass for the day.

34. 34. On Maxentius as a non-persecutor who ended the harassment of Christians in Italy and restored confiscated Church property, see Richard Hoeber, "Maxentius," in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 10 (1911), NewAdvent.org: "soon after this he put an end to the persecution of the Christians in Italy and Africa." The restoration of Roman church property, effected through the urban prefect early in the pontificate of Miltiades (from 311), is attested by Augustine, Breviculus collationis cum Donatistis III.18.34.

35. 35. Martyrologium Romanum, editio typica altera (Vatican City: Typis Vaticanis, 2004), 16 January, commemorating in the cemetery of Priscilla the pope who, "as attested by Saint Damasus, true shepherd, fiercely opposed by apostates who refused the penance established by him and dishonourably denounced to the tyrant, died in exile expelled from the homeland" (translation from the published English and German renderings of the editio typica). The 2004 elogium follows the Damasus tradition of death in exile and gives the title "pope," not "martyr."

36. 36. Marcellus's feast was removed from the General Roman Calendar in the 1969 reform of Paul VI and is now left to local and particular calendars, on his ancient day of 16 January. For the parallel case of a legendary martyr's title set aside by the same reform, see the entry on Pope Saint Felix I in this series. The oldest martyrology, the Martyrologium Hieronymianum, styles the entry a depositio of "Marcellus, pope and confessor."

37. 37. First Council of Nicaea (325), canons 11–14 (graded penance for the lapsed) and canon 13 (viaticum for the dying): "if any man be at the point of death, he must not be deprived of the last and most indispensable Viaticum"; trans. Henry Percival, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 14 (1900). For the fuller treatment of the Nicene settlement of the crisis of the lapsed, see the entries on Pope Saint Eusebius and the Council of Nicaea in this series.

38. 38. The load-bearing sources for the reign are the Liberian Catalogue and the epitaph of Damasus (nn. 11–12, 26–29); the Liber Pontificalis for the tituli and the cemetery (nn. 14–16), with its legendary Passio material set aside (n. 31). Modern assessments in J. N. D. Kelly and Michael J. Walsh, The Oxford Dictionary of Popes, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), s.v. "Marcellus I," and Raymond Davis, The Book of Pontiffs, rev. ed. (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), concur in treating the reorganization of the Roman Church as historical and the catabulum martyrdom as legendary.