Fabian of Rome

In January 236 the Christians of Rome gathered to choose a bishop. Fabian was not a candidate. He was a layman who had come in from the countryside, standing at the back.

Eusebius tells what happened: a dove came down and settled on his head, and the whole assembly, as if moved by one Spirit, shouted his name. They put him in the chair on the spot.

He held it for fourteen years, and they were the most productive years the Roman church had yet had. Fabian divided the city into seven ecclesiastical districts and set a deacon over each, with a subdeacon under him, the administrative skeleton of the Roman church for centuries afterward. He commissioned work in the catacombs, enlarging the burial grounds where his predecessors lay. He appointed notaries to write down the acts of the martyrs, so that what happened to them would be on record rather than in memory.

He also brought his predecessors home. Pope Pontian and the presbyter Hippolytus had died in the Sardinian mines the year before Fabian's election, exiled together after years as bitter rivals. Fabian had their bodies shipped back to Rome and buried with honor, Pontian in the papal crypt of the Catacomb of Callixtus, Hippolytus on the Tiburtine Way. A church that had been split in two buried both its leaders on the same day.

Those fourteen years were mostly peaceful. Then Decius became emperor in 249 and ordered universal sacrifice, and he understood that the bishops were the hinge.

Fabian was among the first to die. He was killed on 20 January 250, in the opening days of the persecution. Cyprian of Carthage, writing shortly after, called his end a glorious one and said the integrity of his administration matched it. The Roman clergy, with no bishop to replace him for over a year because it was too dangerous to elect one, wrote to Carthage that they were governing themselves.

His grave is not a matter of tradition. In 1854 the archaeologist Giovanni Battista de Rossi dug into the Crypt of the Popes in the Catacomb of Callixtus and found the original Greek slab: Fabian, bishop, with the letters M P, for martyr, cut in later by another hand.

Sources: Eusebius, Church History VI.29, VI.39; Cyprian, Letter 9; Liber Pontificalis; G. B. de Rossi, Roma Sotterranea; the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, article Pope St. Fabian.