In the Roman countryside outside of the old city walls a swatch of cypress trees marks the stairway entrance to the Catacombs of St. Calistus. The cemetery lies in the fields several hundred yards behind the posh funeral monuments of major families that lined the Appian Way. Beginning in the year 200 AD, a network of underground passages was excavated beneath the surface to be used for burials.
During the late 1960s I worked here for several weeks as a tour guide and often walked through the “crypt of the popes,” a chamber lined with broken tombstones, upon which names were crudely inscribed in Greek Letters.
Things Greek were highly revered in third-century Rome and the formal prayers of the Mass were still in Greek. But Greek culture, with its love of logic and debate, came at a cost. Church politics were particularly contentious within Christian communities. Three decades earlier, Rome’s leading Christian theologian, had condemned Pope Calistus for being too quick to forgive fallen away believers. Local churches were often at odds with one another. In Rome, breakaway groups and pagan sects that took on Christian trappings were a constant problem.
In the midst of such turmoil, a 42-year-old Roman priest of Greek birth named Xystus, was elected bishop of Rome in August 257. Shortly afterwards, he successfully moderated disputes roiling Christian communities in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, and reconciled Cyprian, a major bishop of the African Church, with the church of Rome. Despite the good Xystus accomplished, his tenure in office threatened to be brief. Already in that decade, three pontiffs had come and gone, and in the face of renewed persecutions, it did not seem that he would last for long.
In the early morning of Monday, August 8, 258, Xystus accompanied by four deacons, began a celebration of the Mass in the underground entry hall of the Catacombs of St. Calistus. In darkness broken, only by the flickering flames of oil lamps, he was preaching from the celebrant’s chair when soldiers burst into the room. In the commotion that followed, a futile effort was made by the congregation to prevent them from reaching the pope, but Xystus asked the congregation to let the soldiers pass. As was later written, “he was the first to offer himself and his own head, not tolerating that the pagan frenzy should harm the others.” Shortly afterwards he was beheaded. He had been pope for only 341 days.
Today, most Catholic visitors to Rome have never heard of Xystus II and find the crypt of the popes of only passing interest. For centuries, however, Christian pilgrims revered his burial place and that of other early popes as among the holiest sites in Rome. It deserves better. “For anyone who has some measure of insight and listens to the message of the stone,” a modern scholar writes, “the papal crypt…is one of the most impressive monuments in the whole compass of ancient Rome. Here one stands in the main current of ancient Church history.”
During his short time in office, however, Xystus had made a deep impression on Rome’s Christian community. Of all the third century Roman bishops, six of whom were revered as martyrs, Xystus II holds first place. A few decades after his death, the remains of other priests, deacons, and bishops were placed in the crypt and each given a simple tombstone, with their names and titles crudely incised with letters of the Greek alphabet. But the place of prominence was given to Xystus who was buried at the head of the chamber below an altar. When the prayers of the Eucharist were codified for the first time in the following century, the name of Pope Xystus was among the dozen saints listed in the Canon of the Latin Mass. It is still found in First Eucharistic Prayer of the Liturgy.