Portrait medallion of Pope Marcellinus, after the basilica frieze

Saint Marcellinus

The pope of the Great Persecution, accused of handing over the scriptures and offering incense, and quietly left off the church's own lists.

Pope no. 29296-304

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Marcellinus, a Roman elected on 30 June 296, had seven untroubled years before Diocletian's first edict of 23 February 303 ordered every church demolished, every copy of the scriptures surrendered, and every Christian of rank stripped of office. What the bishop of Rome did when the officers came is the one question anyone has asked about him, and the answer has been contested ever since. He died in 304, in October according to one tradition, and for the next four years the Roman church could not or would not elect a successor.

Disputed

The charge that Marcellinus handed over the sacred books and burned incense to the gods was made by the Donatists in Africa a century later, who added that his deacons Marcellus, Miltiades, and Silvester, all future popes, did the same. Augustine denied it as slander. But the Liber Pontificalis, a Roman source with no motive to invent it, says he "was led to sacrifice, so that he offered incense," repented, and was beheaded; and the church's own calendar of 354 omits him from its list of bishops, as does Damasus, who wrote verses for lesser men. A sixth-century forgery, the "Council of Sinuessa," has three hundred bishops decline to try him because "the first see is judged by no one," a phrase that would enter papal law. The likeliest reading is that he complied, that Rome was ashamed, and that the martyrdom was invented to repair it.

Whatever he did, he did not do it alone. The Roman church that emerged from the persecution was divided between those who had stood firm and those who had lapsed, and the fight over readmitting the fallen would drive his next two successors into exile. He was buried in the cemetery of Priscilla, not in the papal crypt of Callixtus, and his feast on 26 April left the general calendar in 1969.

A full essay on this pope is in preparation. The facts and summary above are complete and sourced.

Sources

J. N. D. Kelly and Michael Walsh, The Oxford Dictionary of Popes (2010)
Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes (2014)
Raymond Davis (trans.), The Book of Pontiffs (Liber Pontificalis) (2000)
Further reading: Wikipedia