Pope Saint Urban I: The Seventeenth Pope, a Life Written by Legend, and the Riddle of the Two Urbans

The seventeenth in a series on the popes.

The sixteenth pope, Callixtus, is the best-documented figure of the early papacy, and for a perverse reason: his bitterest enemy wrote a book to destroy him, and the book survived. The seventeenth pope is the mirror image. Urban succeeded Callixtus around the year 222 and reigned for the better part of a decade, and about what he actually did in those years the honest historian can write almost nothing. “Nothing is known concerning the personal labours of Pope Urban,” the Catholic Encyclopedia states, and it is not being modest.⁠¹ There is no hostile biography, no doctrinal controversy preserved under his name, no letter, no decree, no confrontation. There is a name, a father’s name, a span of years, and a grave—and even the grave is contested.

And yet Urban is not a blank. He is, if anything, one of the more richly storied popes of the early centuries: the bishop who baptized Saint Cecilia’s husband at the third milestone of the Appian Way, who converted senators, who outfitted the Roman churches with silver, who died a martyr’s death and became, in the vineyards of the Rhineland, the patron saint of the wine harvest. The trouble is that every one of those stories is legend, and most of it demonstrably late. Urban is the pope about whom we know least and have been told most—and the gap between the two is itself the subject worth writing about. This entry is less a biography than a study in how the Church remembers a man of whom history preserved almost nothing, and how, in Urban’s case, the modern Church came to admit as much.

This is the seventeenth entry in my series on the popes, following Peter, Linus, Anacletus, Clement, Evaristus, Alexander I, Sixtus I, Telesphorus, Hyginus, Pius I, Anicetus, Soter, Eleutherius, Victor I, Zephyrinus, and Callixtus I.

The Documentary Skeleton

Strip away the legend and here is the entire hard record. Eusebius, writing his Church History within a century of the events, disposes of Urban in a single clause: “Urbanus, who had been for eight years bishop of the Roman church, was succeeded by Pontianus.”⁠² That is the load-bearing fact—an episcopate of about eight years—and it is corroborated by the other early source, the Liberian Catalogue of popes preserved in the Chronograph of 354, which assigns Urban eight years, eleven months, and twelve days, and dates his reign by the consuls from 223 to 230.⁠³ The Liber Pontificalis adds that he was a Roman by birth, the son of a man named Pontianus, and—in a variant that no one follows—shortens the reign to four years.⁠⁴ The Catholic Encyclopedia settles on the standard dates: “Reigned 222-30, date of birth unknown; died 23 May, 230.”⁠⁵

That is nearly all of it. A Roman named Urban, son of Pontianus, became bishop of Rome after the death of Callixtus in October 222 and held the office for roughly eight years until his death around 230. Every additional sentence one might wish to write—about his character, his decisions, his pastoral acts—rests on sources that the same historians who supply the skeleton dismiss as worthless. The temptation, in a series like this one, is to fill the silence. The discipline is to describe it, and then to ask why later ages found it so unbearable that they filled it themselves.

The Peace of Alexander Severus

The one thing that can be said about Urban’s world with confidence is that it was, for a Christian bishop, unusually safe. Urban’s entire pontificate fell within the reign of the emperor Severus Alexander, who came to the purple in 222—the same year as Urban—and ruled until 235. Alexander persecuted no one. He favored, in the eclectic manner of the age, a broad religious tolerance, and the Roman church, in the Catholic Encyclopedia’s phrase, “enjoyed complete peace in essentials, although their legal status was not changed.”⁠⁶ Christianity remained, on the books, an illicit religion; but no imperial hand moved against it during these years.

The emperor’s mother, Julia Mamaea, is the hinge on which the era’s reputation turns. Eusebius calls her a devout woman who, curious about Christianity, summoned the great Alexandrian teacher Origen to Antioch to be instructed by him; and Hippolytus—of whom more shortly—dedicated a treatise on the resurrection to her.⁠⁷ One should not overread this. Eusebius calls Mamaea religious, not Christian, and the inference that she converted goes beyond his words. But the picture is coherent: a court that took Christianity seriously enough to send for its finest mind, in the very decade Urban sat in Peter’s chair. The concrete proof is a lawsuit. When the Roman Christians and a guild of tavern-keepers both claimed a piece of city land, and the Christians wished to build on it, the dispute reached the imperial court—and the emperor decided for the Christians, ruling that it was better for God to be worshipped there in any fashion than for the site to go to a tavern.⁠⁸ A church that can win real property in an emperor’s court is a church that has arrived.

The temptation with Severus Alexander is to make him more Christian than he was, and the ancient sources fell to it hard. The Historia Augusta—a notoriously unreliable collection of imperial biographies, composed by a single anonymous author late in the fourth century behind the fiction of six earlier writers—reports that Alexander kept statues of Christ and Abraham, alongside Orpheus and Apollonius, in the private shrine of his household gods, and that he had a herald proclaim a version of the Golden Rule.⁠⁹ These are charming stories and almost certainly fictions of a much later hand; the sober point beneath them, that Alexander “suffered the Christians to exist,” is the one datum the tradition can bear.⁠¹⁰ This peace matters enormously for how we read Urban’s death—because a violent martyrdom under an emperor who persecuted no one is, on its face, improbable. It is the same logic that governs his predecessor’s case, and it will return.

The intellectual confidence of Roman Christianity in these years has a face beyond the papacy. Sextus Julius Africanus, the first Christian to attempt a universal chronology of the world, was at Rome in exactly this period as a favorite of Severus Alexander; his five-volume Chronographiai reached down to the year 221, and tradition credits him with organizing the imperial library housed in the Pantheon.⁠¹¹ A faith that produces a court-sponsored scholar of that ambition, and wins land disputes before the emperor, is not a hunted sect. It is a growing institution—which is the truest thing that can be said about the church Urban governed.

The Schism He Inherited

Urban did inherit one problem, and it was the great scandal of the previous pontificate. The learned and embittered Hippolytus, who had regarded Callixtus’s election as a catastrophe, had broken with the Roman church and, by the traditional accounting, had allowed himself to be set up as a rival bishop—the first antipope. That breach did not heal when Callixtus died. Hippolytus and his followers persisted in schism throughout Urban’s reign; indeed it was probably during these very years that Hippolytus composed the Refutation of All Heresies, the savage hostile biography of Callixtus on which so much of the previous entry depends.⁠¹²

Here again, though, the honest report is silence. The Catholic Encyclopedia states that “Urban maintained the same attitude towards the schismatical party and its leader that his predecessor had adopted”—but this is inference by analogy, not attested fact.⁠¹³ No source records a single word or act of Urban’s toward Hippolytus. We know the schism outlived him: it was healed only in 235, five years after Urban’s death, when the emperor Maximinus deported both Hippolytus and Urban’s successor Pontian to the mines of Sardinia, where the two rivals were reconciled before they died and were brought home to be venerated together as saints.⁠¹⁴ That reconciliation is one of the moving codas of early papal history—but it belongs to Pontian’s story, not Urban’s. Of Urban’s own dealings with the most divisive figure of his age, the record says nothing, and the reader is owed the nothing rather than a manufactured confrontation.

The Church in Silver

The one concrete administrative act the tradition assigns to Urban is a telling one—telling not for what it says about Urban, but for what it reveals about how his biography was built. The Liber Pontificalis credits him with having “made all the sacred vessels of silver” and providing twenty-five silver patens.⁠¹⁵ It is a precise, plausible, satisfying detail—and it is an anachronism. The Catholic Encyclopedia is blunt about it: the notice is “only an invention of the later editor of the biography early in the sixth century, who arbitrarily attributed to Urban the making of certain vessels, including the patens for twenty-five titular churches of his own time.”⁠¹⁶ The sixth-century compiler knew that Rome had twenty-five titular churches in his day, each needing its silver; lacking anything to say about the third-century Urban, he read his own church back into the past and credited the vacancy with the plumbing.

And yet the invented detail preserves a real truth, the way a legend often does. The Roman church of the 220s was in fact growing fast and organizing rapidly. The Catholic Encyclopedia draws the sober inference from the archaeology: “The increase in extent of various Roman Catacombs in the first half of the third century proves that Christians grew largely in numbers during this period.”⁠¹⁷ Callixtus had already given the Roman church its first corporately owned cemetery; within a generation of Urban’s death the Roman clergy would number forty-six presbyters, seven deacons, and a supporting establishment running to hundreds, supporting fifteen hundred widows and poor.⁠¹⁸ A church of that scale did need silver vessels, and titular churches, and administration. The sixth-century editor was wrong about Urban and right about the trajectory. He simply hung the trajectory on the nearest available name.

Cecilia’s Bishop

If the silver patens show a legend forming around Urban, the Acts of St. Cecilia show one swallowing him whole. Sometime around the middle of the fifth century—two hundred years and more after Urban’s death—an anonymous Roman author composed a passion of the virgin-martyr Cecilia, and into it he wrote a pope named Urban.⁠¹⁹ In the story Cecilia, married against her will to the pagan Valerian, tells her husband on their wedding night that an angel guards her virginity; when Valerian asks to see the angel, she sends him down the Appian Way:

Valerianus wished to see the angel, whereupon Cecilia sent him to the third milestone on the Via Appia where he should meet Bishop (Pope) Urbanus. Valerianus obeyed, was baptized by the pope, and returned a Christian to Cecilia.⁠²⁰

Valerian’s brother Tiburtius is converted in turn; both are martyred; Cecilia, after a botched execution in the overheated bath of her own house, lingers three days and is buried by Urban “among the bishops and the confessors.” It is a beautiful and wholly fictional narrative—“a pious romance,” the Catholic Encyclopedia says, “like so many others compiled in the fifth and sixth century,” with “no historical value whatever.”⁠²¹ The Liber Pontificalis’s own claim that Urban “converted many by his sermons,” including Valerian, is simply the Acts of St. Cecilia feeding back into the papal biography; the Catholic Encyclopedia traces the notice directly to the legend.⁠²²

Why Urban? The hagiographer needed a pope for his story, and he reached for the name nearest to hand—literally. A confessor named Urban lay buried near the martyrs of Cecilia’s circle, and the author, in the encyclopedia’s careful judgment, “without any authority, simply introduced the confessor of this name… on account of the nearness of his tomb to those of the other martyrs and identified him with the pope of the same name.”⁠²³ This single sentence is the master key to the whole Urban problem. The vivid pope of legend was assembled out of a real pope’s name, a nearby tomb, and a novelist’s need. And once the identification was made, it proved impossible to unmake—it generated a martyrdom for Urban (in Acts later still than Cecilia’s), a feast, an iconography, and eventually a place in the wine-cellars of the Rhine. The confusion that built the legend also, as it happens, lost the pope’s grave.

The Riddle of the Two Urbans

Here the story becomes a genuine detective puzzle, and one that pitted the two founders of Christian archaeology against each other. The early authorities do not agree on where Pope Urban was buried, and the Catholic Encyclopedia states the difficulty exactly: “Two different statements are made in the early authorities as to the grave of Urban, of which, however, only one refers to the pope of this name.”⁠²⁴ The problem, in other words, is that there were two Urbans—a pope and a bishop-confessor of the same name—and the sources have tangled their graves.

The older tradition is unanimous and clear. The Liber Pontificalis, the Acts of St. Cecilia, and the seventh-century pilgrim itineraries all place Pope Urban in the Catacomb of Praetextatus, on the Via Appia, one of them giving him the title “Bishop and Confessor.” On this evidence, the encyclopedia concludes, “from the fourth century, all Roman tradition has venerated the pope of this name in the Urban of the Catacomb of Praetextatus.”⁠²⁵ Then, in the excavations that made his name, Giovanni Battista de Rossi found something that seemed to overturn the tradition. Digging in a double chamber of the Catacomb of Callixtus—the great papal cemetery whose Crypt of the Popes he had rediscovered in 1854—he uncovered a fragment of a sarcophagus lid inscribed in Greek: ΟΥΡΒΑΝΟϹ Ε—“Urban,” followed by the initial of the word episkopos, “bishop.” De Rossi noted that a fifth-century list of those buried in the Catacomb of Callixtus, drawn up under Pope Sixtus III, also named an Urban; and he concluded that the pope had lain here, among the popes, all along, while the Urban of Praetextatus was some other bishop who happened to die at Rome.⁠²⁶

Most historians followed the great archaeologist. But the Catholic Encyclopedia’s own author, Johann Peter Kirsch, following the critical work of Louis Duchesne, reached the opposite conclusion—and his reasons are worth weighing, because they cut against the romantic reading. The lettering of the San Callisto slab, Kirsch observed, is of a later period than the genuine papal epitaphs in the crypt nearby; and in the very Sixtus III list de Rossi cited, this Urban appears not in the succession of popes but among the foreign bishops who died at Rome and were buried in the catacomb. The verdict:

Thus it seems necessary to accept the testimony that Pope Urban was buried in the Catacomb of Praetextatus, while the Urban lying in St. Callistus is a bishop of a later date from some other city.⁠²⁷

Duchesne clinched the reconstruction from the martyrology itself. The Martyrologium Hieronymianum records, under May 25, the burial of a “bishop Urban,” but with a garbled topography that mixes up two roads; Duchesne demonstrated that a line had dropped out of the underlying list of papal graves, and that the notice originally placed Pope Urban on the Via Appia, in the Catacomb of Praetextatus. The other Urban—the foreign bishop of the San Callisto slab—turns up separately in the same martyrology on May 19, in a list of martyrs buried in the Catacomb of Callixtus.⁠²⁸ Two Urbans, two catacombs, two dates: the pope on the Appian Way at Praetextatus on May 25, the stranger among the popes’ neighbors at San Callisto on May 19. That, at least, was the conclusion of the standard reference work a century ago.

How the Church Decided—and Undecided

The riddle of the two Urbans might have remained a scholars’ curiosity had the Church’s own liturgical books not been forced to choose. And here is the twist that gives the whole story its point: the modern Church chose de Rossi over Duchesne, and did so without fanfare, by moving a date.

For centuries Pope Urban’s feast fell on May 25—the Praetextatus date, the traditional one. By the middle of the twentieth century it had already dimmed: in the calendar of the 1962 Missal, May 25 belonged principally to Pope Gregory VII, with Urban reduced to a mere commemoration.⁠²⁹ Then, in the sweeping calendar reform of 1969, Urban I was removed from the General Roman Calendar altogether—one of roughly two hundred saints whose observances the reformers judged too poorly attested, too legendary, or too local for the universal Church. May 25 went to Bede, Gregory VII, and Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi; Urban simply dropped off.⁠³⁰ He was not condemned—he remains a saint—but the Church that had once kept his feast for all the faithful now let it go. Given a pope of whom “nothing is known,” and whose vivid acts were confessedly legend, the reformers did the honest thing.

He survives, though, in the Roman Martyrology, the Church’s fuller catalogue of the saints—and it is there that the decision between the two archaeologists was quietly made. The current Martyrologium Romanum commemorates Urban not on the old May 25, but on May 19, and locates him in the Cemetery of Callistus on the Appian Way, noting that after the martyrdom of Callixtus he governed the Roman church for eight years.⁠³¹ May 19 and the Catacomb of Callixtus: that is de Rossi’s Urban, the pope of the Greek slab—the very identification the old Catholic Encyclopedia had argued against. Without a word of explanation, by shifting the feast six days and changing the catacomb, the modern Martyrology reversed the verdict of its own standard reference work and placed the pope back among the popes. Whether de Rossi was right remains, strictly, unproven; but the Church has voted with its calendar.

The relics, at least, have a settled home, and it is neither catacomb. In the ninth century Pope Paschal I, gathering the martyrs out of the decaying catacombs and into the churches of the city, took up the bones venerated as Urban’s—together with those of Cecilia, Valerian, Tiburtius, Maximus, and Pope Lucius—and reburied them under the high altar of the basilica of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, where they were rediscovered by a cardinal in 1599 and where they rest today.⁠³² It is a fitting resting place for the pope the legend had married to Cecilia: fiction had bound them in a fifth-century romance, and devotion laid them, at last, under one altar.

The Wine-Saint

There is one more layer of accreted identity, and it is the strangest. In the wine-growing regions of German-speaking Europe, Saint Urban is the patron of vineyards, vintners, and coopers, invoked against frost and thunderstorm, honored on May 25 as “Urbanstag”—a day of processions with a garlanded statue of the saint, doused with wine in fair weather and with water in foul, and read as an oracle of the coming vintage: as the weather on Urban’s day, runs the country proverb, so the autumn will be.⁠³³ None of this has anything to do with Pope Urban I. The wine-patronage attaches partly to the calendar accident that May 25 falls when the vines flower and the spring vineyard work must be finished, and partly to a confusion—by now the reader will not be surprised—with yet another Urban, the fifth-century bishop Urban of Langres, whose legend made him the protector of viticulture. As one hagiographical reference dryly notes, “the actual wine-saint, however, is Urban of Langres.”⁠³⁴ The historical pope, invisible in his own century, ended by lending his name to the grape harvest of lands he never knew, on the strength of a date and a mix-up.

What We Can Actually Say

Reduce Urban to the load-bearing evidence and almost nothing remains standing, which is the honest result. A Roman named Urban, the son of a man called Pontianus, was elected bishop of Rome after the death of Callixtus in October 222 and held the office for about eight years, until his death around 230. His entire reign fell within the tolerant peace of Severus Alexander, during which the Roman church grew, held property, won a lawsuit before the emperor, and produced scholars—but faced no persecution. He inherited the Hippolytan schism and, so far as any source records, did nothing about it that history remembers. He died, in all probability, a natural death, and was buried in a catacomb that the two greatest students of the catacombs could not agree upon. That is the pope.

Everything else—the baptism of Valerian at the third milestone, the conversion of Cecilia’s household, the silver patens, the martyr’s crown, the miracles of the vineyard—is the work of later centuries, doing to Urban what human memory always does with a revered but empty name: it fills the vacancy. The Acts of St. Cecilia gave him a drama; the Liber Pontificalis gave him an administration; the medieval calendar gave him a martyrdom; the Rhineland gave him a harvest. Each accretion is false as history and revealing as devotion. And the Church, in the end, did the rarest and most bracing thing an institution built on memory can do: it looked at the record, admitted that it did not know, moved his grave and his feast to match the best evidence it had, and let his universal observance quietly lapse. Set beside Callixtus—whose martyr’s cult is early, documented, and secure in the oldest calendar Rome possesses—Urban is the counter-case, the reminder that not every early pope left a footprint, and that honesty about the silence is a form of reverence too. By Callixtus the office had become recognizably itself; with Urban the series turns from the office to its evidence—a lesson in what the sources can and cannot bear, and in the discipline of saying so.

Next in the series: Pope Saint Pontian (coming soon).

Further Reading

For the early papacy generally, 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 essential nineteenth-century foundation for everything in this entry is Giovanni Battista de Rossi’s La Roma sotterranea cristiana (1864–1877), the work that founded the scientific study of the catacombs; Louis Duchesne’s critical edition of the Liber Pontificalis (Paris, 1886) supplies the counter-argument on Urban’s grave. On the Roman church of the era, Peter Lampe, From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries, trans. Michael Steinhauser (Fortress Press, 2003). The legendary sources are the Acts of St. Cecilia (critical text in Hippolyte Delehaye, Étude sur le légendier romain, 1936) and the Liber Pontificalis, “Urban I,” in Louise Ropes Loomis, The Book of the Popes (Columbia University Press, 1916).

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, and Saint Callixtus I, the sixteenth pope.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Pope Saint Urban I?

Urban I was the seventeenth Bishop of Rome counting Peter as first, reigning about 222 to 230. He succeeded Callixtus I and preceded Pontian, and his entire pontificate fell within the peaceful, tolerant reign of the emperor Severus Alexander. Remarkably little is known of him: the standard reference work states plainly that “nothing is known concerning the personal labours of Pope Urban.” The vivid stories attached to his name—that he baptized the husband of Saint Cecilia, converted Roman senators, and outfitted the churches with silver—all come from much later and legendary sources.

Did Pope Urban I really baptize Saint Cecilia’s husband?

Almost certainly not. The story comes from the Acts of St. Cecilia, a devotional romance composed around the middle of the fifth century—more than two hundred years after Urban’s death—which the Catholic Encyclopedia calls “purely legendary” with “no historical value whatever.” In the tale, Cecilia sends her husband Valerian to meet Pope Urban at the third milestone of the Appian Way, where Urban baptizes him. Scholars judge that the anonymous author simply borrowed the name of an Urban buried near the martyrs of Cecilia’s circle and identified him with the pope. The story is the reason Urban is so famous and tells us nothing historical about him.

Was Pope Urban I a martyr?

Probably not. Unlike his predecessor Callixtus, Urban does not appear in the Depositio Martyrum, the earliest Roman martyr-calendar, and his entire reign fell under Severus Alexander, an emperor who persecuted no Christians. The Catholic Encyclopedia concludes that “the particulars of the death of Urban are unknown, but, judging from the peace of his era, he must have died a natural death.” The Acts describing his martyrdom are later even than the legend of St. Cecilia. He was traditionally titled “pope and martyr,” but the historical basis for the martyrdom is essentially nonexistent.

Where is Pope Urban I buried?

This is genuinely disputed. The archaeologist Giovanni Battista de Rossi found a Greek slab reading “ΟΥΡΒΑΝΟϹ” (“Urban, bishop”) in the Catacomb of Callixtus and argued the pope was buried there among the other popes. But the older tradition—the Liber Pontificalis, the Acts of St. Cecilia, and the early pilgrim guides—placed the pope in the Catacomb of Praetextatus across the way, and the scholar Louis Duchesne argued that the San Callisto slab belonged to a different, foreign bishop of the same name. The modern Roman Martyrology sided with de Rossi, placing Urban in the Cemetery of Callistus on May 19. His relics, meanwhile, were moved by Pope Paschal I in the ninth century to the basilica of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, where they rest under the high altar.

Why was Pope Urban I removed from the calendar?

In the 1969 reform of the General Roman Calendar, Urban I was among roughly two hundred saints whose feasts were dropped from the universal calendar because little or nothing certain was known of them, or because their traditional Acts were legendary. Urban fit both descriptions: his biography is a vacancy, and the stories that filled it—the Cecilia legend, his martyrdom—are demonstrably late fiction. He remains a recognized saint and is still commemorated in the Roman Martyrology on May 19, but his feast is no longer observed by the whole Church. The removal was not a condemnation; it was an admission of how little is known.

Why is Saint Urban the patron of winemakers?

By accident and confusion. In German-speaking wine regions, “St. Urban” (Urbanstag, May 25) is honored as patron of vineyards and vintners and read as a weather-oracle for the coming harvest. This attaches to Pope Urban I mainly because his old feast day, May 25, coincides with the flowering of the vines—and because he was confused with a different saint, the fifth-century bishop Urban of Langres, whose legend actually made him the protector of viticulture. As one hagiographical reference notes, “the actual wine-saint is Urban of Langres.” The pope himself has no historical connection to winemaking.

Footnotes

1. 1. Johann Peter Kirsch, "Pope Urban I," in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 15 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912). Available at NewAdvent.org.

2. 2. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica VI.23.3, trans. A. C. McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 1 (1890): "While these things were in progress, Urbanus, who had been for eight years bishop of the Roman church, was succeeded by Pontianus." The preceding notice (VI.21.2) records that Callixtus "continued for five years, and was succeeded by Urbanus." Available at NewAdvent.org.

3. 3. The Liberian Catalogue (the list of popes in the Chronograph of 354) assigns Urban eight years, eleven months, and twelve days, dating the reign from the consulate of Maximus and Aelianus (223) to that of Agricola and Clementinus (230): Theodor Mommsen, ed., Chronica Minora, vol. 1, MGH Auctores Antiquissimi 9 (Berlin, 1892), 73–76. Kirsch, "Pope Urban I," notes that "the document called the Liberian catalogue of popes puts the beginning of his pontificate in the year 223 and its close in the year 230."

4. 4. Liber Pontificalis, "Urban I": "Urban, by nationality a Roman, son of Pontianus," in Louise Ropes Loomis, The Book of the Popes (Liber Pontificalis) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1916); critical Latin text in L. Duchesne, ed., Le Liber Pontificalis, vol. 1 (Paris: Thorin, 1886), 143. The Liber Pontificalis's own figure for the reign (four years, ten months, twelve days) is a minority reading contradicted by both Eusebius and the Liberian Catalogue and is universally rejected in favor of the eight-year span.

5. 5. Kirsch, "Pope Urban I," opening line: "Reigned 222-30, date of birth unknown; died 23 May, 230."

6. 6. Kirsch, "Pope Urban I": "The result of the favourable opinion of Christianity held by the emperor and his mother was that Christians enjoyed complete peace in essentials, although their legal status was not changed… the Roman Church experienced the happy results of these kindly intentions and was unmolested during this emperor's reign (222-235)."

7. 7. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica VI.21.3–4, on Julia Mamaea—"a most religious woman, if there ever was one"—summoning Origen to Antioch; NewAdvent.org. Eusebius calls her devout, not Christian, and the inference of conversion goes beyond the text. On Hippolytus's dedication of a treatise on the resurrection to Mamaea, see Jerome, De viris illustribus 61, and Kirsch, "Pope Urban I."

8. 8. Kirsch, "Pope Urban I," recounting the incident from the Historia Augusta (Vita Alexandri Severi 49): "When they wished to build a church on a piece of land in Rome which was also claimed by tavern-keepers, the matter was brought before the imperial court, and Severus decided in favour of the Christians, declaring it was better that God should be worshipped on that spot."

9. 9. Historia Augusta, Vita Alexandri Severi 29.2 (statues of Christ, Abraham, Orpheus, and Apollonius in the imperial lararium) and 51.7–8 (the Golden Rule maxim). On the work's character, the classic demonstration that the whole collection is the product of a single anonymous author writing late in the fourth century is Hermann Dessau, "Über Zeit und Persönlichkeit der Scriptores Historiae Augustae," Hermes 24 (1889): 337–392; its pro-Christian anecdotes about Alexander are widely regarded as later embellishment and cannot be pressed as third-century evidence.

10. 10. Historia Augusta, Vita Alexandri Severi 22: "Christianos esse passus est" ("he suffered the Christians to exist"), quoted by Kirsch, "Pope Urban I," who attributes it to "the historian Lampridius." The tag is the soundest datum the tradition preserves for the reign's tolerance, though its sole source remains the unreliable Historia Augusta.

11. 11. On Sextus Julius Africanus—his embassy to Rome about 222, his patronage under Severus Alexander, the Chronographiai reaching to 221, and the tradition that he organized the library housed in the Pantheon (a detail resting on a fragment of his own Kestoi)—see the entry in the Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. "Sextus Julius Africanus." Eusebius later built his own Chronicle on Africanus's foundation.

12. 12. Kirsch, "Pope Urban I": "The dissension produced in the Roman Church by Hippolytus continued to exist during Urban's pontificate. Hippolytus and his adherents persisted in schism; it was probably during the reign of Urban that Hippolytus wrote his 'Philosophumena' [the Refutation of All Heresies], in which he attacked Pope Callistus severely." On Hippolytus and the schism, see the Callixtus entry of this series.

13. 13. Kirsch, "Pope Urban I": "Urban maintained the same attitude towards the schismatical party and its leader that his predecessor had adopted. The historical authorities say nothing of any other factious troubles in the life of the Roman Church during this era." The first sentence is an inference by analogy to Callixtus, not an attested act of Urban's.

14. 14. The deportation of Hippolytus and Pope Pontian to Sardinia in 235 under Maximinus Thrax, their traditional reconciliation, and the later return and joint veneration of both as martyrs are recounted in the Callixtus entry; see also Johann Peter Kirsch, "St. Hippolytus of Rome," in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7 (1910). The reconciliation postdates Urban's death by about five years and belongs to Pontian's pontificate, not Urban's.

15. 15. Liber Pontificalis, "Urban I" (Loomis, The Book of the Popes; Duchesne, Le Liber Pontificalis, I, 143): the notice that Urban "made all the sacred vessels of silver and provided twenty-five silver patens."

16. 16. Kirsch, "Pope Urban I": "Another statement on the same authority, that Urban had ordered the making of silver liturgical vessels, is only an invention of the later editor of the biography early in the sixth century, who arbitrarily attributed to Urban the making of certain vessels, including the patens for twenty-five titular churches of his own time."

17. 17. Kirsch, "Pope Urban I": "The increase in extent of various Roman Catacombs in the first half of the third century proves that Christians grew largely in numbers during this period." On the corporate cemetery administration instituted under Zephyrinus and Callixtus, see the Zephyrinus entry.

18. 18. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica VI.43.11, quoting the letter of Pope Cornelius (c. 251) enumerating the Roman clergy: "forty-six presbyters, seven deacons, seven sub-deacons, forty-two acolyths, fifty-two exorcists, readers, and janitors, and over fifteen hundred widows and persons in distress." This census belongs to Cornelius's pontificate, roughly a generation after Urban, and is cited here only as the nearest reliable measure of the Roman church's growing scale, not as a figure for Urban's own reign.

19. 19. On the Acts (Passio) of St. Cecilia and its date, see Kirsch, "St. Cecilia," in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 3 (1908): "About the middle of the fifth century originated Acts of the martyrdom of St. Cecilia." The critical Latin text is edited in Hippolyte Delehaye, Étude sur le légendier romain: les saints de novembre et de décembre (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1936), 194–220; some scholars would place the composition as late as the sixth century.

20. 20. Kirsch, "St. Cecilia," summarizing the Acts. Available at NewAdvent.org.

21. 21. Kirsch, "St. Cecilia": "In this shape the whole story has no historical value; it is a pious romance, like so many others compiled in the fifth and sixth century."

22. 22. Kirsch, "Pope Urban I": "The statement of the 'Liber Pontificalis' that Urban converted many by his sermons, rests on the Acts of St. Cecilia." Kirsch, "St. Cecilia," likewise: "The author of the 'Liber Pontificalis' used the Acts for his notice of Urbanus."

23. 23. Kirsch, "St. Cecilia": "From the mention of Urbanus nothing can be concluded as to the time of composition of the Acts; the author without any authority, simply introduced the confessor of this name (buried in the Catacomb of Praetextatus) on account of the nearness of his tomb to those of the other martyrs and identified him with the pope of the same name."

24. 24. Kirsch, "Pope Urban I": "Two different statements are made in the early authorities as to the grave of Urban, of which, however, only one refers to the pope of this name."

25. 25. Kirsch, "Pope Urban I": "In the Acts of St. Cecilia and the 'Liber Pontificalis' it is said that Pope Urban was buried in the Catacomb of Praetextatus on the Via Appia. The Itineraries of the seventh century… all mention the grave of an Urban… One of the Itineraries gives this Urban the title 'Bishop and Confessor.' Consequently, from the fourth century, all Roman tradition has venerated the pope of this name in the Urban of the Catacomb of Praetextatus."

26. 26. Kirsch, "Pope Urban I": "In excavating a double chamber of the Catacomb of St. Callistus, De Rossi found… a fragment of the lid of a sarcophagus that bore the inscription ΟΥΡΒΑΝΟϹ Ε[πίσκοπος]. He also proved that in the list of martyrs and confessors buried in the Catacomb of St. Callistus, drawn up by Sixtus III (432-40), the name of an Urban is to be found. The great archaeologist De Rossi therefore came to the conclusion that the Urban buried in St. Callistus was the pope." On de Rossi's rediscovery of the Crypt of the Popes in the Catacomb of Callixtus (1854) and his La Roma sotterranea cristiana, see the Callixtus entry.

27. 27. Kirsch, "Pope Urban I." The reasons Kirsch gives against de Rossi: "The lettering of the above-mentioned epitaph of an Urban in St. Callistus indicates a later period, as a comparison with the lettering of the papal epitaphs in the papal crypt proves. In the list prepared by Sixtus III… Urban is not given in the succession of popes, but appears among the foreign bishops who died at Rome and were buried in St. Callistus." Note that Kirsch's own earlier article ("St. Cecilia," 1908) had leaned the other way, calling the crypt of the popes the place where "Urbanus probably" was buried—a sign of how genuinely unsettled the question was.

28. 28. Kirsch, "Pope Urban I," following L. Duchesne, Le Liber Pontificalis, I, xlvi–xlvii: the Martyrologium Hieronymianum notice under May 25 (VIII kal. Iun.) originally recorded Pope Urban's grave "on the Via Appia in the Catacomb of Praetextatus," a line having dropped from the underlying list; while the May 19 (XIV kal. Iun.) notice, heading a list of martyrs buried in the Catacomb of St. Callistus and "including an Urban," refers to "the foreign bishop of that name who lies buried in the same catacomb."

29. 29. In the 1960 rubrics and the 1962 Missale Romanum, May 25 was kept principally as the feast of Pope St. Gregory VII, with St. Urban I reduced to a commemoration—so his May 25 observance had already been eclipsed well before the 1969 reform. See the entry "Urban I." in the Ökumenisches Heiligenlexikon (heiligenlexikon.de).

30. 30. Calendarium Romanum (Vatican City: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1969); Urban I is not retained in the revised General Roman Calendar, where May 25 carries Bede the Venerable, Gregory VII, and Mary Magdalene de' Pazzi. Roughly two hundred saints were removed from the universal calendar in the reform, chiefly those known essentially by name and burial or whose Acts were legendary. On the general principle, cf. the note appended in the same volume to St. Christopher, retained on particular calendars because "although the Acts of St. Christopher are fabulous [fabulosa], ancient monuments of his veneration are found."

31. 31. Martyrologium Romanum, editio typica altera (Vatican City: Typis Vaticanis, 2004), 19 May: the commemoration of Saint Urban I, pope, in the Cemetery of Callistus on the Appian Way, who after the martyrdom of Callixtus governed the Roman church faithfully for eight years, alongside the martyrs Parthenius and Calocerus. The choice of May 19 and the Cemetery of Callistus adopts de Rossi's identification of the pope with the San Callisto Urban, reversing the conclusion of the 1912 Catholic Encyclopedia.

32. 32. Kirsch, "St. Cecilia": "The relics of St. Cecilia with those of Valerianus, Tiburtius, and Maximus, also those of Popes Urbanus and Lucius, were taken up by Pope Paschal [I, 817–824], and reburied under the high altar of St. Cecilia in Trastevere." Cardinal Sfondrato's rediscovery of the relics beneath the altar during the restoration of 1599 is recorded in the same article.

33. 33. On the German folk cult of "St. Urban" (Urbanstag, 25 May) as patron of vineyards, vintners, and coopers, the processions with the garlanded statue, and the weather-lore proverbs ("Wie's Wetter am Sankt Urbanstag, so der Herbst wohl werden mag"—"As the weather on St. Urban's day, so the autumn may turn out"), see the entry "Urban I." in the Ökumenisches Heiligenlexikon (heiligenlexikon.de) and the wine glossary at wein.plus, s.v. "Urban."

34. 34. Ökumenisches Heiligenlexikon, "Urban I.": "Der eigentliche Weinheilige ist aber Urban von Langres" ("the actual wine-saint, however, is Urban of Langres"), the fifth-century bishop whose legend credits him with the protection of viticulture and with whom Pope Urban I was conflated. The wine-patronage attaches to Pope Urban chiefly through the coincidence of the May 25 date with the flowering of the vines.