Saint Eutychian

Eutychian's pontificate is the longest stretch of silence in the third-century record. Elected on 4 January 275, a few months before Aurelian's murder, he governed the Roman church for nearly nine years through the short reigns of Tacitus, Probus, and Carus, none of whom troubled the Christians, and died on 7 December 283. Eusebius, who lists him, gives him "not quite ten months," a slip that the Liberian Catalogue's consular dates correct. The Liber Pontificalis calls him a Tuscan from Luni, the son of Marinus, and no earlier source says anything at all.

What the book adds is legend of a particular kind. Eutychian, it says, buried three hundred and forty-two martyrs with his own hands, ordered that martyrs be interred wearing the dalmatic, the purple-striped tunic that later became the deacon's vestment, and allowed the fruits of the field, beans and grapes, to be blessed on the altar. The first two are impossible in years without persecution; the third may preserve a real Roman harvest custom that the compiler wanted to give a founder.

He was buried in the papal crypt of the catacomb of Callixtus, the ninth and last bishop to be placed there; his Greek epitaph, "Eutychianos, bishop," was recovered by de Rossi in the 1850s. The church that Eutychian governed was, by the end of his reign, openly building and openly worshipping, with a generation of members who had never seen an edict. Eusebius, describing those years from the far side of Diocletian, remembered them as the calm in which the church grew proud.