CORNELIUS, Pope. - The Lib. Pont. (I, p. 150), in its biography, calls him "natione Romanus"; G. B. De Rossi considered him a relative rather than a client of the "gens Cornelia." He was a priest when he was elected as the successor of Fabian, after about 14 months of vacant see, at the beginning of March of the year 251, while the emperor Decius had left Rome to fight the Goths. As soon as he was elected, C. sent letters to the episcopate announcing his appointment, and Cyprian notified the community of Carthage of it (Ep. 45, 2). The priest Novatian, who during the vacant see had written to St. Cyprian in the name of the Roman clergy (Ep. 30 in the Cyprianic collection) and had declared that he did not aspire to the succession of Fabian, as soon as he saw C. seated "intrepid" on the episcopal chair (Cyprian's Ep. 55, 9), had himself elected bishop by three bishops and appeared suddenly in March before the community of Rome, as if a catapult — wrote C. himself to bishop Fabius of Antioch — "had hurled him into our midst" (Eusebius, Hist. eccl., VI, 43, 7).
C. convoked a Council in Rome in the autumn of 251, in which sixty bishops and a great number of priests and deacons took part (Eusebius, Hist. eccl., VI, 43, 2); in it the decisions of the Synod of Carthage concerning the "lapsi" were confirmed and Novatian and his partisans were excommunicated.
Eusebius reports a part of the letter sent by C. to bishop Fabius of Antioch to communicate to him the deliberations of the council; in it the composition of the clergy of the community of Rome is listed for the first time; it consisted of forty-six priests and seven deacons and seven subdeacons, besides the minor clergy which comprised 42 acolytes and 52 among exorcists, lectors and ostiaries (Eusebius, Hist. eccl., VI, 43, 11). The spontaneous offerings of the faithful made it possible to support daily 1500 among widows and the needy. In June of the year 252 the emperor Gallus suddenly unleashed the persecution, imposing exile on the bishops, as is attested by bishop Dionysius of Alexandria (Eusebius, Hist. eccl., VII, 1) and by St. Cyprian (Ep. 60, 2), from whom we learn that C. was arrested, but as soon as this news spread through the community of Rome many faithful rushed forward and wished to accompany him to the tribunal, joining in his confession, so that the Pope had "multos gloriae comites" and was "dux confessionis fratribus" (Cyprian, Ep. 60, 2).
C. was condemned to exile in Civitavecchia, where in June of the following year 253 "cum gloria dormitionem accepit" (Liberian Catalogue). His remains were translated to Rome certainly after 258 and deposited in the part of the cemetery of Callistus closest to the Appian Way, in a deeper region, within a large quadrangular niche plastered on the inside, closed on the outside for the most part by a wall and for the rest by a marble slab on which at first only the name and his dignity were engraved, CORNELIUS EP(ISCOPUS), then to the right was added the glorious title of MARTYR. This is the only Latin inscription of the popes of the first centuries.
St. Cyprian too calls C. "beatum martyrem" (Ep. 61, 3): he is the "sacerdos pacificus et iustus et martyrio quoque dignatione Domini honoratus" (Ep. 67, 6; 69, 3).
The anonymous African author of the treatise Ad Novatianum emphasizes the example he gave of "boni pastoris."
The Church of Rome celebrated not the date of his death and temporary deposition in Centumcellae, but that of his definitive deposition in Callistus; it coincided "eodem die, sed non eodem anno" (Jerome, De viris illustribus, 67) with the commemoration of the bishop of Carthage St. Cyprian, celebrated in Rome already in the first half of the 4th century in Callistus (Depositio Martyrum). In the Hieronymian Martyrology, under the date of Sept. 14, one reads: "XVIII Kalendas octobres Romae via Appia in cimitero Calesti Corneli episcopi" (codex of Bern).
The tomb of St. C. was later embellished by pope Damasus (366-84), with a carmen in Philocalian letters, whose text the syllogae have not handed down; of it G. B. De Rossi found about the right half when he discovered the tomb of the Pope in 1854. Below the tomb itself was a second, very mutilated inscription, which the same De Rossi attributed to pope Siricius (384-99). Later the adjacent walls were decorated with the paintings of saints C., Cyprian, Sixtus II and Othatus bishop. Wilpert has dated them to the time of John III (561-74). On the painted walls and on the same funerary slab of the Pope, of which De Rossi recognized a fragment as early as 1849 in the lintel, the pilgrims of the 7th-9th centuries wrote their names; before the tomb lamps were then burning. Among the inscriptions found near the crypt are remembered a marble slab containing the inscription of a ΜΑΣΙΜΟΥΣ Π. Ρ. (πρεσβύτερος) who is perhaps the priest Maximus confessor contemporary with the Pope, and that of a certain Serpentius who bought the tomb from the fossor Quintus "ad sanctum Cornelium."
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Enrico Josi