Stephen I, Pope, Saint

STEPHEN I, Pope, Saint. - He is commemorated in the Depositio Episcoporum on August 2 as buried in the cemetery of Callistus. On the same date and in the same place he is remembered by the Leonine Sacramentary (the name only), by the Hieronymian Martyrology and by the Liber Pontificalis; the itineraries "de locis" and the Malmesbury itinerary indicate him as buried on the Via Latina, confusing him with the protomartyr of the same name to whom a church was dedicated on that very road.

The Gregorian Sacramentary and the Hieronymian Martyrology qualify him as a martyr, which is unknown to the ancient Roman liturgical tradition: this dignity was attributed to him in the 6th century by the author of the Passio (BHL. 7845), who confused the accounts of St. Stephen with the end of Pope Sixtus II (v.). He was elected on May 12, 254, and his brief pontificate was troubled by certain controversies concerning Spain, Gaul and Africa. The bishops Basilides of León and Astorga, and Martial of Mérida had been deposed by their Spanish colleagues as libellatici. Basilides, however, unable to bear the deposition, went to Rome and succeeded in convincing Stephen of his innocence, obtaining his rehabilitation. The Spaniards then turned to St. Cyprian, and he, at the Synod of 254, against Stephen's sentence, declared the two bishops unworthy and deposed. To the same St. Cyprian also turned Bishop Faustinus of Lyon, after having accused his colleague Marcian of Arles in vain before Stephen as a Novatianist. St. Cyprian then wrote a strong and urgent letter to Stephen, urging him to act with energy for the safeguarding of ecclesiastical discipline and to depose Marcian. Last was the question that arose between Cyprian (v.) himself and Stephen concerning Baptism administered by heretics, which in Rome, in Egypt and in Palestine was not customarily repeated, contrary to what was instead practiced in Syria, in Asia Minor and especially in Africa. The question, already agitated in the 2nd century, became more heated in the 3rd century; certain African councils had proposed their own practice as the only legitimate one, and the decisions of that of 255-56 were also communicated to Stephen so that he would accept them. The Pontiff refused to receive the African legates and indeed wrote a letter to St. Cyprian and to the churches of the East, in which he claimed the legitimacy of the Roman practice, to which all were to conform. St. Cyprian in September 256 convoked a new synod in which 87 bishops reaffirmed the previous decisions on the matter. The death of Stephen, which occurred on August 2, 257, put an end to the troublesome question, and the persecution of Valerian, which broke out shortly afterward, raised other problems to be resolved.

Agostino Amore