Pope Urban I

Urban became bishop of Rome in 222, succeeding Callistus, and held the office until 230. His eight years fell in one of the strangest windows in the history of the early church: a stretch of official calm, sandwiched between persecutions, in which Christianity was still illegal and almost nobody was being killed for it. The reason was the emperor. Severus Alexander came to the throne the same year Urban was elected, and his mother Julia Mamaea, who effectively governed, had a documented interest in Christianity — she had summoned Origen to come and explain it to her. The Roman biographer Lampridius reports that Severus Alexander kept images of Abraham and of Christ in his private shrine alongside Orpheus and Apollo, and that he had a saying he liked from the Christians, do not do to another what you would not have done to you, inscribed on the palace wall. He is also said to have ruled in a property dispute that a piece of public land should go to the Christians rather than to a guild of tavern-keepers, on the ground that any worship of God was better than a bar. That is the world Urban administered. The church of Rome grew, its clergy multiplied, its cemeteries expanded, and the fight that had torn it apart under Callistus — Hippolytus and his rival congregation — went on without resolution through Urban's whole term. What he personally did is not recorded. The Liber Pontificalis attributes to him the conversion of Valerian, the husband of Cecilia, and a decree about silver liturgical vessels; both come from a later legendary tradition, and historians do not rely on them. The martyrdom sometimes attributed to him rests on the same material and on a confusion with a different Urban buried in a different cemetery. The reign of Severus Alexander makes a martyrdom in Rome in those years unlikely. His grave is better attested than his life. A fragment of a Greek slab reading OURBANOS E — Urban, bishop — was found in the papal crypt of the Catacomb of Callixtus, the burial chamber of the third-century Roman bishops. He died in 230. Five years later Maximinus Thrax took the throne and the arrests began again. Sources: Eusebius, Church History VI.21, VI.23; Liber Pontificalis; Lampridius, Life of Severus Alexander in the Historia Augusta; the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, article Pope St. Urban I.