CORNELIUS, POPE. - The Liber Pontificalis (I, p. 150), in his biography, describes him as “natione Romanus”; G. B. De Rossi considered him more a kinsman than a client of the “gens Cornelia.” He was a priest when he was elected to succeed Fabian, after about fourteen months of a vacant see, at the beginning of March in the year 251, while the emperor Decius had left Rome to fight the Goths. As soon as he was elected, Cornelius sent letters to the episcopate announcing his appointment, and Cyprian notified the community at Carthage of this (Ep. 45, 2). The priest Novatian, who during the vacancy 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 Cornelius “intrepid” seated on the episcopal chair (Cyprian, Ep. 55, 9), had himself elected bishop by three bishops and suddenly appeared before the Roman community in March as if—Cornelius himself wrote to the bishop Fabian of Antioch—“a catapult had hurled him among us” (Eusebius, Hist. eccl., VI, 43, 7).
Cornelius convened a council in Rome in the autumn of 251, to which sixty bishops and a large number of priests and deacons attended (Eusebius, Hist. eccl., VI, 43, 2); at this council the decisions of the Synod of Carthage regarding the “lapsed” were confirmed, and Novatian and his partisans were excommunicated.
Eusebius reports part of the letter sent by Cornelius to the bishop Fabian of Antioch to communicate the council’s deliberations; in it, for the first time, the composition of the clergy of the Roman community is listed. It consisted of forty-six priests and seven deacons and seven subdeacons, besides the minor clergy which included forty-two acolytes and fifty-two among exorcists, readers, and ostiarii (Eusebius, Hist. eccl., VI, 43, 11). The spontaneous offerings of the faithful allowed for the daily support of five hundred widows and the needy. In June of the year 252, the emperor Gallus suddenly unleashed a persecution, imposing exile on the bishops, as attested by the bishop Dionysius of Alexandria (Eusebius, Hist. eccl., VII, 1) and by St Cyprian (Ep. 60, 2), from whom we learn that Cornelius was arrested; but as soon as this news spread through the Roman community, many of the faithful rushed to accompany him to the tribunal, joining in his confession, so that the Pope had “many companions of glory” and was “the leader of the brethren’s confession” (Cyprian, Ep. 60, 2).
Cornelius was condemned to exile in Centumcellae, where in June of the following year, 253, “he received the sleep of glory” (Liberian Catalogue). His remains were certainly translated to Rome after 258 and deposited in the part of the Catacomb of Callistus nearest to the Appian Way, in a deepened area, within a large quadrangular niche lined internally with plaster, closed externally for the most part by a wall and for the rest by a marble slab on which was first inscribed only the name and his dignity, CORNELIUS EP(ISC)ORUS, and later to the right was added the glorious title of MARTYR. This is the only Latin inscription of the early popes.
St Cyprian also calls Cornelius “blessed martyr” (Ep. 61, 3): he is the “peaceful and just priest, honored also by the Lord with martyrdom” (Ep. 67, 6; 69, 3).
The anonymous African author of the treatise Ad Novatianum highlights the example he gave of a “good shepherd.”
The Church of Rome celebrated not the date of his death and temporary burial in Centumcellae, but that of his definitive burial in the Catacomb of Callistus; it coincides “on the same day, but not in the same year” (Jerome, De viris illustribus, 67) with the commemoration of the bishop of Carthage, St Cyprian, already celebrated in Rome in the first half of the 4th century in the Catacomb of Callistus (Depositio Martyrum). In the Martyrologium Hieronymianum, under the date of 14 September, we read: “XVIII Kalendas octobres Romae via Appia in cimiterio Calesti Cornelii episcopi” (Bernese codex).
The tomb of St Cornelius was later embellished by Pope Damasus (366–84) with a poem in Philocalian letters, the text of which the collections have not preserved; G. B. De Rossi found half of the right side when he discovered the Pope’s tomb in 1854. Beneath the tomb itself was a second, much mutilated inscription, which the same De Rossi attributed to Pope Siricius (384–99). Later, the adjacent walls were decorated with paintings of the saints Cornelius, Cyprian, Sixtus II, and the bishop Optatus. Wilpert dated these to the time of John III (561–74). On the painted walls and on the very marble slab of the Pope, of which De Rossi recognized a fragment as early as 1849 on the surface, pilgrims of the 7th–9th centuries inscribed their names; in front of the tomb lamps burned. Among the inscriptions found near the crypt, mention should be made of a marble slab containing the inscription of a MAEMIOCE II P(εσεβότερος), who is perhaps the priest Maximus the Confessor, a contemporary of the Pope, and that of a certain Serpentius who acquired the tomb from the gravedigger Quintus “ad sanctum Cornelium.”