Saint Damasus I

Saint Damasus I was pope from 366 to 384. In a time of disputes about the faith he defended the teaching of the Council of Nicaea, entrusted Saint Jerome with the revision of the Latin translation of Sacred Scripture, and took the tombs of the Roman martyrs into his care, adorning them with inscriptions in verse. The Church commemorates him on December 11.

He was born about 305, most probably in Rome; the exact date is not known. An old tradition, recorded in the Liber Pontificalis, connects him with Spain. His father, Antonius, rose to the priestly dignity in the Roman Church; his mother, Laurentia, as a widow devoted her life to God; and his sister Irene was a consecrated virgin. Damasus became a deacon of Pope Liberius, whom the emperor sentenced to exile for opposing a policy that favored the Arians.

After the death of Liberius in 366, the majority of the clergy and the faithful chose Damasus as bishop of Rome. A minority, however, proclaimed the deacon Ursinus pope, and bloody clashes broke out in the city. The emperor recognized Damasus and sentenced Ursinus to exile, but the supporters of Ursinus went on harassing the pope with accusations for years. In the end the emperor himself declared them a calumny.

Damasus convened several synods in Rome. At them he defended the Nicene faith against the Arians and rejected the teaching of Apollinaris, which denied Christ a complete humanity, as well as the errors of those who denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit. In 380 Emperor Theodosius ordered by edict that all should hold the faith which the apostle Peter handed on to the Romans and which is professed by Bishop Damasus in Rome and by Peter in Alexandria. Damasus forcefully stressed the primacy of the Roman Church; in his time the name Apostolic See came into use.

In 382 Saint Jerome came to Rome. The pope made him his secretary and encouraged him to revise the Latin translation of the Gospels on the basis of the Greek text. So began the work that Jerome carried on long after the death of Damasus and from which grew the Vulgate, for centuries the commonly used Latin text of the Bible.

He held the martyrs in particular veneration. He had their tombs in the Roman catacombs sought out and restored. He himself composed poems in their honor, which the calligrapher Furius Dionysius Filocalus carved in marble; about sixty of the pope’s epigrams have survived. In the Crypt of the Popes in the Catacombs of Saint Callistus he confessed in one such inscription that he had wished to rest there but feared to disturb the peace of the holy ashes.

He died on December 11, 384, being, according to Saint Jerome, almost eighty years old. He was buried on the Via Ardeatina, in a church that he himself had built, beside his mother and sister. In the epitaph he composed for himself he professed his faith that Christ, who raised Lazarus, would raise him too. He has been venerated as a saint since antiquity, without a formal canonization. The Roman church of San Lorenzo in Damaso bears his name, and the Collect of the Mass of December 11 remembers him as one who venerated and loved the martyrs.