Pope Pontian

Pontian was elected bishop of Rome on 21 July 230. We know the day because a Roman document called the Liberian Catalogue, compiled in 354 from official church records, gives exact dates for his term, the first bishop of Rome for whom that is true. From Pontian onward the Roman succession stops being tradition and starts being dated administration.

He inherited a divided church. For more than a decade the presbyter Hippolytus, the ablest scholar in Rome, had refused to recognize the bishops and had been leading a rival congregation as an antipope. Pontian was the third bishop to serve against that split.

His reign was quiet for five years, through the tolerant reign of Severus Alexander. Then in 235 Maximinus Thrax seized the throne, and his policy toward the church was simple and effective: go after the leaders. Both leaders, in Rome's case.

Pontian and Hippolytus were arrested together and sentenced to the mines of Sardinia. Roman officials called the place insula nociva, the unwholesome island, condemnation to those mines was understood as a death sentence carried out slowly, with the prisoners flogged, shackled, underfed, and worked.

On 28 September 235 Pontian resigned. It is the first abdication of a bishop of Rome on record, and the Liberian Catalogue gives the exact date, which means Rome received word and entered it in the books. He had understood that a bishop in a Sardinian mine could not lead a church in Rome, and that the church needed a man who could. Anterus was elected in November.

And on that island, the evidence indicates, the twenty-year schism ended. Hippolytus is reported to have given up his claim and told his followers to return to the church's bishop. Two men who had fought each other for a generation died in the same pit, reconciled.

Pontian died there of ill-treatment, probably in 235. The next bishop, Fabian, had both bodies brought back to Rome in 236 or 237 and buried with honor on the same day, Pontian in the papal crypt of the Catacomb of Callixtus, Hippolytus on the Tiburtine Way.

The archaeologist Giovanni Battista de Rossi found Pontian's original gravestone in 1909 in that crypt: his name in Greek letters with the abbreviation for bishop, and the word MARTUR added underneath in a later hand.

Sources: the Liberian Catalogue in the Chronographer of 354; Liber Pontificalis; the Depositio Martyrum; G. B. de Rossi, Roma Sotterranea; the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, article Pope St. Pontian.