Saint Marcellinus, Pope and Martyr

Let us add a few words to this short account from the Chronicle of the Popes, reproduced by the Roman Breviary: The Church never had more to suffer than in this terrible era. The edifice of idolatry, ruined little by little by the Christians and destroyed in some of its parts, was ready to collapse upon its foundations; the profane altars lacked flowers, the hierophants lacked victims, the haruspices no longer found signs of the future in the entrails, the oracles had become mute, the magicians, powerless. In such a state of affairs, it seemed that all the gods of darkness were attempting their final efforts against the God of light. Diocletian, Maximian, Galerius, and Maximin were successively the four leaders of this infernal enterprise. Galerius, the most furious of all, had wrested from Diocletian the fatal sentence that ordered this atrocious, universal, relentless, and pitiless persecution. Churches were torn down in almost all the provinces; men, women, the elderly, children, and virgins were delivered to the executioners; heaven was populated with martyrs, and the earth, at the sight of such courage, was inflamed with tenderness for Catholicism. They wanted to destroy the religion of Jesus Christ, and all this fury served only to raise the throne of faith upon the debris of paganism.

The states subject to Rome, watered by the blood of the persecuted, only became more fruitful in Christian branches. Torments tore the bodies of the martyrs; but their souls, firmly embracing the faith, remained invulnerable and invincible. There were, however, a great number of the faithful who allowed themselves to be won over by the threats and promises of the pagans.

Now, Marcellinus was bishop of Rome: Urban, the pagan pontiff of the Capitol, came to find him. A discussion began between them on the question of whether it was a great crime to burn incense in honor of the gods. Your Christ, said Urban, he whom you claim to be the son of the Virgin Mary, did he not receive at his cradle the gold, incense, and myrrh presented to him by the Magi?

These Magi believed they were thus honoring the one whom you have made your God and whose resurrection you preach. The act of burning incense is therefore, even according to your own belief, a legitimate homage rendered to the divinity. — Bishop Marcellinus replied to him: The Magi did not offer their incense to a vain idol. By placing it at the feet of Jesus Christ, they clearly manifested that they recognized him as the one and true God. — Do you wish, resumed Urban, to come one of these days to the palaces of Diocletian and Maximian, our invincible and most clement emperors? In their presence, I will answer all your objections on this point. — Marcellinus consented. On the appointed day, which was that of the pagan festival of Vulcan, the pontiff of the Capitol said to the bishop: Let us each write down our reasons, and we will submit them to the emperors. — They did so, and when they had been admitted to the audience of the most sacred princes, Marcellinus, the bishop of Rome, faithful to his mission, and generously confessing Christ with intrepidity: Why, he said to Diocletian, sow the universe with mourning and carnage, regarding the superstitious worship of idols? Why force all men, under pain of death, to burn incense before mute statues? — Urban interrupted him by saying: Address yourself to me, 26 APRIL. I am ready to confound you. Is it not true that, under this injurious term of vain idols, you include the god Jupiter and the invincible Hercules themselves? Is this not how you blaspheme the majesty of Jupiter, who is none other than the sky united to the earth and the seas in his eternal alliance with Saturn? You are a pontiff like me, why then do you not offer, as I do, incense to the divine majesty? — Diocletian spoke: Do not push this man to the limit, he sai d to Urban Dioclétien Roman emperor under whom the martyrdom is said to have taken place. . Nothing yet proves that he wishes to rebel against my power and against the majesty of the immortal gods. — Now, Diocletian spoke thus because Romanus and Alexander, two of his confidants, had told him: If you succeed through gentleness in winning the mind of Marcellinus, the entire population of Rome will obey your edicts and consent to sacrifice to the gods. — Addressing the bishop, therefore, Diocletian said to him: I recognize your wisdom and your prudence. You are perhaps destined to change into a faithful friendship the hatred I have hitherto borne toward the Christian name. Come, and let the people be witness to our reconciliation. — The emperor immediately went to the temple of Vesta and Isis; he had the bishop enter, who was accompanied by three priests, Urban, Castorius, Juvenal, and two deacons, Caius and Innocent: these did not wish to cross the threshold of the idolatrous edifice. They left the bishop immediately, and consequently saw nothing of what happened thereafter in the temple. They ran to the presbyterium, gathered at the Vatican, near the ancient palace of Nero, and recounted the fact. At this news, a crowd of Christians, among others eighty-four witnesses, ran to the temple; they saw Marcellinus throw the incense on the tripod and receive the congratulations of the emperor. Now, these witnesses, after having deposited the sum of money required by law of every accuser, affirmed having seen Marcellinus offer incense.

A synod was held at Sinuessa, in Campania, in the crypt of Cleopatra; filled with sorrow at the thought of his fault, Marcellinus appeared there covered in a hairshirt. A large number of witnesses were heard: at each affirmative deposition, the bishops adjured them to consider the weight of their words and added: You hear, Pontiff, judge now, for you can be neither absolved nor condemned except by yourself. Marcellinus sat at the head of the bishops, for he was held to be innocent as long as he had not condemned himself. He therefore spoke and said in a distinct voice: I have not sacrificed to the gods; I only let a few grains of incense fall upon the tripod. The bishops, then rising, said to the witnesses: We no longer need your attestations after that which has just come from the mouth of the Pontiff. They therefore signed the minutes of the session, and Bishop Quirinus said to Marcellinus: Universal Pontiff, you have wounded all the members of the C Pontife universel Pope contemporary to the beginning of the episcopate of Nectarius. hurch. After eighteen years of an irreproachable priesthood, you have yielded to the malice of Satan. At the following day's session, Bishop Cyriacus said to Marcellinus: Judge at last in your own cause. We await your pontifical sentence. The Pope, then prostrating himself with his forehead in the dust, cried out in a voice broken by sobs: I have sinned before God and before you; I am no longer worthy of the priestly rank; I allowed myself to be seduced by the captious promises of the emperor! The priest Helciades said: He is justly condemned by his own sentence, it is he himself who has pronounced the anathema that strikes him, for no one has the right to condemn the Pontiff. The first see is judge d by no one! — When the minutes of this Le premier siège n'est jugé par personne Ecclesiological principle affirming the judicial immunity of the Pope. session were signed, Marcellinus was the first of all to sign with his own hand, thus subscribing to his own condemnation.

Like Saint Peter, by striking his breast, he had also obtained supreme forgiveness from God. Having returned to Rome, he went to find the emperor and courageously reproached him for having led him, against his will, into such an enormous act of impiety. For his only answer, the emperor had him beheaded. The Golden Legend adds that, to punish himself, he abdicated, and that he was re-elected after this act of profound humility. He is given the whip as an attribute, a symbol of the censure with which he was struck, and the sword, the instrument of his torture.

Without mentioning the Liber Pontificalis, we have borrowed this account 1st from the Roman Breviary; 2nd from the Acts of the Council of Sinuessa, which are found in volume VI of the Patrologia Latina, and which, according to the learned Father Labbe (coll. of Councils, vol. II), are one of the most venerable monuments of antiquity, whose veracity imposes itself upon the mind by a simple reading; which have been unanimously accepted by all churches and inserted into the oldest martyrologies, and which the efforts of modern scholars cannot suffice to make regarded as false. Gedescard, Tillemont, Bossuet, and the Germans of our day, heirs to doctrines more or less abandoned among us, even reject the fact of Saint Marcellinus's fall, in order to rid themselves at the same time of the Acts of this council, whose doctrine bothers them. — See also Baronius at the year 303, n. 100-108, who, after having contested the authenticity of the Acts of this council in his first edition, believed he had to modify his opinion in the second; the letter of Pope Nicholas the Great to the Emperor Michael, whose absolute affirmation seems to us to settle the question (Pat. lat., vol. cxx), for if Saint Augustine denies it in an equally absolute manner, he does so for lack of information: he who was unaware, on the eve of being made bishop, that the Council of Nicaea had formulated canons, could well have been unaware of the existence of the Council of Sinuessa, which the Donatists wrongly used as a weapon against the Church (book of Aug. against Petilian and letter 110); the first Bollandists, who affirmed the fall, while Papebroch denied it; Sommer who admitted it, and Noël Alexandre who rejected it; finally, the interesting chapter devoted by Abbé Durras to this question in his Histoire de l'Église, vol. VIII.