The Conclave: A Sometimes Secret and Occasionally Bloody History of Papal Elections Read Free Page B

and Pope Pontian were deported. Pontian resigned his position on 28 September that year, the first pope known to have abdicated, and it was possibly because of the persecution that there was a delay of almost two months before Anterus was elected to replace him.
    Or it may have been that news of Pontian’s death reached Rome about that time. Although the exact date of his death is unknown, he did not survive long in Sardinia. Before his death, however, he and his erstwhile rival Hippolytus had been reconciled and both are now numbered among the saints of the Roman Church.
    Anterus was promptly succeeded by Fabian, despite the persecu- tion which was still in progress, though not for much longer. He became pope on 10 January 236, and was particularly important because he divided Rome into seven ecclesiastical districts, each under the control of a deacon and his assistants. It was their task to distribute alms and generally care for the social well-being of the Christians in their regions of the city. This meant that the deacons became very well known to the people, and for several centuries it was more often than not the deacons, rather than priests, who were elected to the papacy. Eusebius, the Christian historian and Bishop of Caesarea in Palestine, died c. 340, but his history of the Church was completed in the early years of the fourth century. It is true that it was being revised, and added to, well into the 320s, but he was first writing at a time not far removed from the death of Fabian. He lived, however, at a considerable distance from Rome, and most of the narrative relates to the Eastern Church; certainly his story about the election of Fabian must be treated with
    In Times of Persecution 11
    suspicion. There was quite a number of good candidates for Rome’s bishopric, he said, and Fabian was not among them. But then the Holy Spirit came down upon Fabian in the form of a dove and everyone who saw it immediately called out that Fabian was the proper candidate.
    Though most of Fabian’s pontificate was passed in times of peace for the Church, it began during the persecution of Maximinus and ended with the very much more serious, and thorough, persecution of the Emperor Decius. Like Maximinus, Decius had the leaders of the church arrested and, in Fabian’s case, executed. He died a martyr on 20 January 250. His successor was not elected until March of the following year, a delay undoubtedly caused by the persecution. In the meantime the church in Rome seems to have been run by a council, a leading member of which was a priest called Novatian. When they eventually felt able to hold an election, the candidate of choice was a certain Moses, but he died. Novatian, it seems, was expecting to be chosen but instead the choice fell on a priest named Cornelius, whom his contemporary St. Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, called “unambitious.” Novatian was furious and set up a rival community of which he became bishop: if Hippolytus wasn’t the first antipope then Novatian was. It may all have been a matter of thwarted ambition, but Novatian and his followers also claimed that Cornelius had been wrong to be so lenient to those Christians who had lapsed from their faith during the Decian persecution. The treatment of the lapsed was an issue which a ff ected the Church in many places other than Rome, and Novatian’s rigorism was embraced by some throughout the Christian world. But it was Cornelius’s more moderate attitude which finally prevailed, certainly in Rome and
    in most places elsewhere.
    The Emperor Decius was killed in battle. He was followed by Gallus, who revived the persecution. Cornelius was arrested, exiled to what is now Civitavecchia, where he died at an uncertain date but probably in June 253. Lucius was elected on 26 June and almost
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    immediately sent into exile. The exile did not last long because another new emperor, Valerian, showed himself tolerant of Chris- tians. Lucius, however,