Saint Cornelius

For fourteen months after Fabian's death the Roman church dared not elect a bishop, and the presbyter Novatian, its ablest writer, ran its correspondence. When the persecution slackened in March 251 the clergy chose not Novatian but Cornelius, a presbyter of modest gifts, and the disappointed man had himself consecrated by three bishops from the provinces and claimed the see. Rome now had two bishops and a question to settle: whether the thousands who had sacrificed under Decius could ever return. Novatian said never; Cornelius said after penance, and a synod of sixty bishops in Rome backed him and excommunicated his rival. Cyprian of Carthage, after hesitating, threw his weight behind Cornelius and wrote his treatise on the unity of the church to explain why a city could have only one bishop.

Cornelius's own letter to Fabius of Antioch, preserved by Eusebius, is the first census of a Christian community. Rome had, he wrote, forty-six presbyters, seven deacons, seven subdeacons, forty-two acolytes, fifty-two exorcists, readers, and doorkeepers, and "more than fifteen hundred widows and persons in distress, all supported by the grace and kindness of the Master." A church that fed fifteen hundred people every day was, by any measure Rome understood, an institution.

In 252 the emperor Gallus renewed the persecution and Cornelius was banished to Centumcellae, the port now called Civitavecchia, where he died in June 253. Cyprian, who would follow him within five years, hailed him as a martyr.