Saint Julius I

Julius was elected on 6 February 337, four months after Mark's death and three before Constantine's, and inherited the Arian crisis that Sylvester had ignored. In 339 Athanasius, driven from Alexandria a second time, arrived in Rome and asked the pope to hear his case. Julius invited the Eastern bishops to a synod; they refused, and in 341 he wrote them the letter that Athanasius preserved, the first surviving claim by a pope to a say in the affairs of another patriarchate: "Are you ignorant that the custom has been for word to be written first to us, and then for a just decision to be passed from this place?" A Roman synod of fifty bishops declared Athanasius and Marcellus of Ancyra innocent. The East ignored it.

The emperors tried a council. At Sardica in 343 the Eastern and Western bishops split before they met, and the Western half, under Hosius of Córdoba, passed canons that a bishop deposed by his provincial colleagues might appeal to "Julius, bishop of Rome," who could order a retrial. The canons were Western law and would be quoted by Zosimus, seventy years later, as if Nicaea had passed them; the Africans checked and found they had not. Athanasius went home in 346, and Julius wrote the Alexandrians a letter of congratulation.

He died on 12 April 352 and was buried in the catacomb of Calepodius on the Via Aurelia beside Callixtus. He is the first pope whose letters survive at length, and the first to be answered by a whole church saying no.