A reflection for Wednesday within the Twentieth Week after the Octave of Pentecost — S. Callisti I Papæ et Martyris, III classis (14 October)
The Introit puts on the Church’s lips the question Our Lord asked by the lake after the Resurrection: Si diligis me, Simon Petre, pasce agnos meos, pasce oves meas — “Simon Peter, if thou lovest me, feed my lambs, feed my sheep” (cf. John 21:15-17). The psalm that follows it is a psalm of rescue: Exaltabo te, Domine, quoniam suscepisti me — “I will extol thee, O Lord, for thou hast upheld me, and hast not made my enemies to rejoice over me” (Ps. 29:2). Love, then feeding; and behind the feeding, a man who was lifted up when he had fallen. Every element of today’s Mass is already in those two lines, and so is the whole life of the saint whose feast it is.
The Mass Si diligis me belongs to the Supreme Pontiffs. Its Epistle is St. Peter speaking to the shepherds of the Church, and its Gospel is Our Lord speaking to Peter at Caesarea Philippi. In the Office this week the occurring Scripture is still drawn from the Machabees, the chronicle of a faithful people under a hostile power: a fitting setting for a Pope of the third century, a martyr, who governed the Roman Church while the Empire watched it with suspicion.
And the man himself is worth knowing before we hear the readings, because they were chosen for men like him and are uncannily exact about him.
I. A slave, a debtor, a convict, a Pope
Nearly all we know of Callistus’s early life comes from his bitterest enemy, the Roman priest Hippolytus, who wrote it down to discredit him (Refutatio omnium haeresium IX.11-12). The account must be read with that in mind, but even through a hostile lens the outline is clear.
He was born a slave in the household of a Christian named Carpophorus, a member of the imperial household, who set him to manage a bank. The bank failed. Callistus fled, was caught at the harbour of Portus after throwing himself into the sea, and was put to the treadmill. Released to recover the money, he was arrested again after a disturbance in a synagogue and sentenced to the mines of Sardinia, the slow death to which Rome sent its convicts. He came back only because the emperor Commodus’s companion Marcia obtained from Pope St. Victor a list of Christian confessors in the mines and secured their freedom.
Pope St. Zephyrinus then made this ex-slave and ex-convict his deacon, set him over the clergy, and gave him charge of the Christian cemetery on the Appian Way. Callistus enlarged it so greatly that it bears his name to this day, the Catacomb of St. Callistus, where the Popes of the third century were laid in the Crypt of the Popes. When Zephyrinus died about 217, Callistus succeeded him.
His pontificate lasted about five years and was spent in controversy. He condemned the Sabellian heresy, which dissolved the three Persons of the Trinity into three masks of one, and he excommunicated its author, Sabellius. Hippolytus, a learned and severe theologian, accused him of the opposite error and, worse in his eyes, of laxity. The charges are revealing. Callistus, Hippolytus complains, received back into communion those guilty of grave sins after baptism who had done penance; he would not depose a bishop for every sin; he recognized as true marriages before God unions that Roman law forbade, between Christian women of rank and men of lower or servile condition (Ref. IX.12). Hippolytus broke communion and set himself up as rival bishop. About the same time Tertullian, now gone over to the Montanist rigorists, mocked an edict of some pontifex maximus who forgave adultery to the penitent (De pudicitia 1). Whether that bishop was Callistus or a bishop of Carthage is disputed, and it should not be asserted as fact. But the quarrel it reflects is the quarrel of Callistus’s pontificate.
He died about 222. Alexander Severus did not persecute the Church, and the later Acts that tell of his martyrdom, thrown into a well in Trastevere after a tumult of the mob, are legendary in their details. What is certain is older and plainer: the Roman Depositio Martyrum of the year 354 lists Callistus among the martyrs on this day, the fourteenth of October, buried on the Via Aurelia in the cemetery of Calepodius. The man who built the burial place of the Popes was not buried in it. His relics rest now in Santa Maria in Trastevere, the church that Roman tradition says he founded.
II. Forma facti gregis: the Epistle
“The ancients therefore that are among you, I beseech, who am myself also an ancient, and a witness of the sufferings of Christ: as also a partaker of that glory which is to be revealed in time to come: Feed the flock of God which is among you, taking care of it, not by constraint, but willingly, according to God: not for filthy lucre’s sake, but voluntarily: neither as lording it over the clergy, but being made a pattern of the flock from the heart. And when the prince of pastors shall appear, you shall receive a never fading crown of glory… But the God of all grace, who hath called us unto his eternal glory in Christ Jesus, after you have suffered a little, will himself perfect you, and confirm you, and establish you. To him be glory and empire for ever and ever. Amen.” (1 Pet. 5:1-4, 10-11)
The Prince of the Apostles calls himself a fellow-elder. Obsecro consenior. St. Bede, commenting on this Epistle, draws attention to the humility of the word. The one to whom Christ had given the keys does not command the elders from above; he beseeches them as one of them, and he founds his authority not on his rank but on what he has seen: he is testis Christi passionum, a witness of the sufferings of Christ. St. Augustine preached the same paradox on the anniversary of his own consecration: to you, he told his people, I am a bishop, and that is a danger; with you I am a Christian, and that is a grace (Sermo 340). St. Gregory the Great made the paradox into a title, and his successors have signed themselves servus servorum Dei ever since.
Three temptations named. St. Peter sets three pairs against each other: not by constraint but willingly; not for gain but freely; not lording it but being a pattern. St. Gregory’s Regula Pastoralis is in large part an extended commentary on these verses. He warns that the man who seeks the pastoral office for its eminence is already disqualified by the seeking, and that the shepherd must be at once a neighbour to each in compassion and lifted above all in contemplation (Reg. Past. I.8; II.5). The power of the pastor is real. But he is to exercise it as a man who knows he will render an account of every soul entrusted to him.
Not lording it over the clergy. The Vulgate’s in cleris means “over the portions,” the lots allotted to each shepherd; the flock is God’s, and the pastor holds it as a steward and not as an owner. That is exactly what Callistus understood when he refused to make the Church a society of the already perfect. The flock is not the shepherd’s to prune to his taste. It is God’s, and it contains the sick as well as the healthy.
The God of all grace will confirm and establish you. In the Vulgate the last promise reads ipse perficiet, confirmabit, solidabitque: He will perfect, confirm, and make solid. These are rock-words, and they are written by the man named Rock. The Fathers did not miss the echo. On the night of His Passion Our Lord had told Peter that Satan desired to sift him, and that once converted he must confirm his brethren (Luke 22:32). Here, at the end of his life, Peter does exactly that: he confirms his brethren, and he tells them the confirming is not his own work but God’s. He who had been made solid after his own fall promises them the same solidity after they have suffered “a little” (modicum passos). Callistus, who had suffered rather more than a little, was the living proof of the promise.
III. Tu es Petrus: the Gospel
“And Jesus came into the quarters of Caesarea Philippi: and he asked his disciples, saying: Whom do men say that the Son of man is? But they said: Some John the Baptist, and other some Elias, and others Jeremias, or one of the prophets. Jesus saith to them: But whom do you say that I am? Simon Peter answered and said: Thou art Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus answering, said to him: Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jona: because flesh and blood hath not revealed it to thee, but my Father who is in heaven. And I say to thee: That thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven.” (Matt. 16:13-19)
The confession that is revealed. St. John Chrysostom (Hom. in Matt. 54) notes the order of the questions. Our Lord first asks what men say, and then what the Apostles say, so that their confession should be drawn out by contrast with the opinions of the crowd. Peter answers for all, as the mouth of the Apostles. And the Lord at once ascribes the answer not to Peter’s insight but to the Father’s revelation: flesh and blood had not shown it to him. The faith on which the Church is built is not an achievement of human reasoning. It is received.
The rock. St. Hilary of Poitiers sees the Church built on the rock of this confession (De Trinitate VI.36-37); St. Ambrose and others read the rock as Peter himself; St. Augustine, late in life, admitted that he had taught both and left the reader to choose (Retractationes I.21). These readings are not rivals. St. Leo the Great, the Father who meditated most deeply on this Gospel, holds them together: Christ, the one true foundation, gives Peter a share in His own firmness, so that what Christ is by nature Peter is by participation, and the confession and the confessor stand together (Sermo 4, on the anniversary of his consecration). The Church has set the matter beyond debate. The First Vatican Council cites these verses as the foundation of the primacy of jurisdiction conferred on Peter directly and immediately by Christ (Pastor Aeternus, ch. 1), and teaches that this primacy passes to his successors in the Roman see (ch. 2).
Leo adds a sentence that bears directly on today’s saint. The dignity of Peter, he says, does not fail even in an unworthy heir (Sermo 3.4). The office does not rest on the personal merits of the man who holds it. The Church has had holy Popes and wretched ones; the keys have never depended on the holiness of the hand. And yet it is a grace beyond price when the hand that holds them is holy, and the Church canonizes such men precisely to show what the office looks like when the holder is conformed to it.
The keys. To give a man the keys of a house was, in the language of the prophets, to make him steward over it: I will lay the key of the house of David upon his shoulder: and he shall open, and none shall shut (Isa. 22:22). The power to bind and to loose is the power to govern and, above all, to remit or retain sins. St. Jerome, commenting on this verse, warns priests against the arrogance of thinking they bind or loose at their own whim; their sentence is valid when it accords with the judgment of God (Comm. in Matt. III, on 16:19). The Council of Trent teaches that Christ left priests as His vicars, judges to whom sins committed after baptism must be submitted, so that by the power of the keys they may pronounce the sentence of forgiveness or retention (Sess. XIV, ch. 5).
IV. The Mass as a whole: the keys and the mercy
Here the feast comes into focus. The great controversy of Callistus’s pontificate was a controversy about the keys. Could the Church loose a Christian who had fallen gravely after baptism? The rigorists said no: some sins, once committed, were beyond the Church’s power, and a penitent could only be left to the mercy of God. Callistus said yes: what Christ gave Peter was the power to loose whatsoever, and the Church that refuses to use it for the penitent has misunderstood both her Lord and herself. Hippolytus accused him of turning the Church into a refuge for sinners. In a sense the accusation was exactly right, and it is the highest praise Callistus ever received.
The rigorists lost the argument, not because the Church grew lax but because she saw that her holiness does not consist in the absence of sinners from her pews. It consists in Christ’s presence in her, and in the power He left her to heal. Within a generation the same question returned, after the Decian persecution, over the lapsed who had sacrificed to idols; and the Roman Church under St. Cornelius, with St. Cyprian at Carthage, held to the same answer against the schism of Novatian. The Church has never since doubted it.
St. Thomas teaches that all things go forth from God and return to Him, and that the return is accomplished through Christ, who is the way (Summa Theologiae I, q. 2, prologue; III, prologue). Today’s Mass traces that path through the office of Peter. Grace goes forth from Christ, the princeps pastorum, the Prince of Shepherds. It reaches the flock through the shepherds He appoints, beginning with Peter, to whom He gives the keys. It returns to God when the flock is fed and the fallen are loosed, when sheep that have wandered are carried back, until all are called in æternam suam gloriam, to His eternal glory. The keys exist for one reason: to open. Peter is the doorkeeper, and the door he keeps is the door of heaven.
And the shepherd walks the same road as the sheep. Callistus had been bound, literally, in chains and in the mines; he had been loosed by the charity of a Pope. Raised to the Chair, he did for sinners what had been done for him. The Epistle’s promise and the Gospel’s power met in a single life: he who had suffered a little and been made solid became a rock on which other fallen men could stand.
V. The Collect
Deus, qui nos conspicis ex nostra infirmitate deficere: ad amorem tuum nos misericorditer per Sanctorum tuorum exempla restaura.
“O God, who seest that we fail through our own weakness: in Thy mercy restore us to Thy love by the examples of Thy Saints.”
The prayer is almost startling on the feast of a Pope. It asks nothing about authority, nothing about government, nothing about the keys. It begins by confessing failure, ex nostra infirmitate deficere, and asks for restoration, restaura, the word used for rebuilding a ruin. And it names the means: the examples of the saints. That is the honest prayer for this day. Callistus is not set before us as a man who never failed but as a man who was restored, and who spent his pontificate restoring others. His example is offered to us as part of God’s mercy, a proof that the ruin of a life can be rebuilt into something that holds up the Church.
VI. A word for practice
Examine. Where have I written someone off? Is there a person in my family, my parish, or my past whose fall I have treated as final, as though God’s mercy could not reach them or the Church’s could not receive them? And where have I written myself off, by staying away from the confessional because I think my sin too large or too familiar?
Do. Go to confession this week, and go with gratitude for the power Christ gave to Peter. If there is someone you have shut out, take one concrete step toward them: a letter, a call, a prayer said by name.
Pray. The Collect of the day, slowly, attending to the word restaura. And pray for the Holy Father, that he may feed the flock as St. Peter commanded: willingly, freely, and as a pattern.
Aspiration. Domine, tu omnia nosti: tu scis quia amo te. “Lord, thou knowest all things: thou knowest that I love thee” (John 21:17).
Devote. It is the month of the Holy Rosary. Pray the Sorrowful Mysteries, lingering on the first, the Agony in the Garden, where Our Lord prayed that Peter’s faith would not fail; and then the Glorious Mysteries, with the third, the Descent of the Holy Ghost, when the fisherman who had denied Him stood up to preach.
If you wish to go deeper: the Church History path takes up the penitential controversies of the third century, from Callistus and Hippolytus through the Novatian schism, and the reconciliation of Hippolytus himself, who died a martyr in the Sardinian mines alongside Pope St. Pontian. The Sacred Liturgy path treats the Sacrament of Penance and the development of its discipline. The Theology and Doctrine path examines the primacy of Peter as taught by St. Leo and defined at the First Vatican Council. The Lives of the Saints path continues with the Popes of the Crypt of the Popes in the Catacomb of St. Callistus.
Sources. Scripture is cited from the Douay-Rheims with the Vulgate. The Fathers are given in paraphrase with their loci: St. Hippolytus, Refutatio omnium haeresium IX.11-12; Tertullian, De pudicitia 1; St. Bede, In Epistolas Septem Catholicas, on 1 Peter 5; St. Augustine, Sermo 340 and Retractationes I.21; St. Gregory the Great, Regula Pastoralis I.8 and II.5; St. John Chrysostom, Homiliae in Matthaeum 54; St. Hilary of Poitiers, De Trinitate VI; St. Leo the Great, Sermones 3 and 4; and St. Jerome, Commentarius in Matthaeum III. Magisterial texts: Council of Trent, Session XIV; First Vatican Council, Pastor Aeternus. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae. The date and place of burial follow the Depositio Martyrum of the Chronograph of 354.
Sancte Calliste, ora pro nobis.