Callistus I of Rome

Callistus began life as the slave of a Christian named Carpophorus in the imperial household at Rome. His master set him up in banking, and the venture failed — deposits from Christian widows and others went missing. Callistus fled by ship, was caught, and was brought back. What happened next put him in the mines. In a synagogue on a sabbath he made a scene, apparently trying to collect debts from Jewish creditors, and was hauled before the city prefect Fuscianus, flogged, and sentenced to the lead mines of Sardinia — a sentence most men did not survive. He got out. Marcia, the influential mistress of the emperor Commodus and a friend to Christians, obtained a release list for the Sardinian prisoners. Callistus's name was not on it. He talked his way onto the boat anyway. Back in Rome, bishop Zephyrinus made him a deacon and put him in charge of the Christian burial ground on the Appian Way. It became the principal cemetery of the Roman church and it still bears his name: the Catacomb of Callixtus, where a whole row of third-century bishops of Rome lies buried. Around 217 Callistus was elected bishop of Rome. He served about five years. Everything above comes from a man who hated him. The presbyter Hippolytus, a formidable scholar, wrote the account in his Refutation of All Heresies, and he lost the election to Callistus. Hippolytus set himself up as a rival bishop rather than submit — the first antipope — and his portrait of Callistus as a swindler and a heretic has to be read as testimony from the losing side. The real quarrel was about mercy. Callistus ruled that Christians guilty of adultery and fornication could be restored to communion after penance, where the rigorists held such sins were beyond the church's power to forgive. He accepted clergy who had married more than once. And he recognized as marriages the unions of Christian noblewomen with men of lower rank or slaves, which Roman law would not — protecting women who otherwise faced a choice between an unequal marriage the state disowned and no marriage at all. Hippolytus called this laxity, a school for sin. Callistus called it the church, and cited the parable of the wheat and the tares. He died about 222 or 223. Tradition says he was killed in a local riot and thrown down a well; the record of his death is not firm. He was buried not in his own great cemetery but on the Aurelian Way. Sources: Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies IX (Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5); Liber Pontificalis; the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, article Pope Callistus I; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 2.