Stephen I of Rome

Bishop of Rome in a season of controversy

Stephen was a Roman, of the family of the Julii by the oldest notice, who served in the clergy of the city under Lucius I and was elected bishop of Rome in 254, in the reign of Valerian — a reign that began in tolerance and ended in the fiercest imperial persecution the Church had yet faced. The Roman church he inherited was still convalescing from the Decian persecution of 250–251, which had produced a mass of apostates and a bitter argument about what to do with them.

Against the party of Novatian — who had made himself a rival bishop of Rome and taught that those who had sacrificed under torture, and by extension all grave sinners, were beyond the Church's power to forgive — Stephen held the line his predecessors had taken: that the Church has authority to receive the penitent, and that the medicine of repentance is not withdrawn from those who most need it. The synaxarion notices preserve exactly this: that he "contended against the heresy of Novatus, which taught that it is not proper to receive back those who return."

The controversy over the baptism of heretics

The second dispute set Stephen against much of the episcopate of Africa and Asia Minor. Cyprian of Carthage, with the councils of Carthage, and Firmilian of Caesarea in Cappadocia held that baptism administered outside the Church is no baptism at all, and that converts from heresy must be baptised. Stephen ruled otherwise: that the returning heretic is to be received by the laying on of hands in penance, the baptism itself — given in the name of the Trinity — not being repeated, and he invoked the custom handed down at Rome as binding, "let nothing be innovated beyond what has been received." The exchange grew heated; letters were sent, communion was threatened, and the argument was still unresolved when both men were dead. The Church's later settled practice, and the canons received in the East, followed Stephen's principle in substance while allowing that the reception of particular sects be judged by the nature of their error — a nuance the Council in Trullo and the canonical epistles of St Basil the Great later spelled out. The Byzantine tradition honours Stephen as a saint without adopting the whole of his position, and honours Cyprian on the same terms.

The martyrs of his household and clergy

The passion that the Greek synaxaria transmit gathers around Stephen a company of martyrs made by his own hand. He is said to have healed Lucilla, the blind daughter of the tribune Nemesius, and to have baptised father and daughter; Nemesius was afterwards ordained deacon, and both were beheaded. His steward Symphronius, the tribune Olympius, his wife Exuperia and their son Theodolus were burned alive. Twelve of his clergy — the names transmitted as Bonus, Faustus, Maurus, Primitivus, Calumniosus, John, Exuperantus, Cyril, Theodore, Basil, Castulus, Honoratus and Tertullinus — were beheaded (the roll is transmitted with some variance, and the number of names carried in the manuscripts sometimes exceeds twelve).

Martyrdom

With Valerian's edict the persecution reached the Roman clergy directly. Stephen kept his flock in the catacombs, where he continued to teach, baptise and celebrate. There, by the passion, the soldiers found him — in the account, seated in his chair teaching the Christians assembled around him — and struck off his head, on 2 August 257. His successor Sixtus II was taken in the same way in the cemetery of Callistus a year later, which is the historical pattern of Valerian's edict against the bishops. Stephen's body was buried in the cemetery of Callistus on the Appian Way.