Saints Sixtus II and Companions

Saint Sixtus II was bishop of Rome for less than a year, from August 257 to August 258. He was killed in the persecution under Emperor Valerian, and six deacons of the Roman Church died with him: four were executed together with the pope, two on the same day in another place. The Church commemorates them together on August 7.

Nothing certain is known about his life before his election; according to the Liber Pontificalis, the ancient book of the lives of the popes, he was a Greek. He succeeded Stephen I, under whose pontificate a sharp dispute had arisen with the Churches of Africa and Asia Minor over whether heretics returning to the Church should be baptized again. Sixtus kept to the Roman custom, which did not require this, but acted in a conciliatory way toward those Churches. The deacon Pontius, biographer of Saint Cyprian of Carthage, called him a good priest who made peace.

In 257 Valerian forbade Christians to assemble in cemeteries. In 258 he sent the Senate a rescript whose content Saint Cyprian reported in a letter to Bishop Successus: bishops, priests, and deacons were to be put to death without delay. In the same letter, written shortly afterward, Cyprian states that Sixtus was put to death in the cemetery on August 6, and four deacons with him.

According to the Roman Martyrology, soldiers suddenly seized the pope while he was celebrating the sacred rites and teaching the brethren in the cemetery of Callixtus on the Appian Way. He was beheaded together with the deacons Januarius, Vincent, Magnus, and Stephen, and was buried in the same cemetery, in the crypt of the popes. On the same day two more of his deacons, Felicissimus and Agapitus, died in the nearby cemetery of Praetextatus and were buried there. More than a hundred years later Pope Damasus placed a verse inscription at the tomb of Sixtus. It tells that when the soldiers came, the faithful were ready to offer their necks, but the aged shepherd was the first to offer his own head, so that the cruelty would reach no one else.

A few days later, on August 10, Saint Lawrence was killed. He was the archdeacon of Sixtus, to whom the pope had entrusted the administration of the community’s goods. Saint Ambrose handed down a tradition about their last conversation: Lawrence wept because he could not accompany his father in death, and Sixtus answered that a still greater struggle awaited him and that he would soon follow. Saint John Paul II recalled Lawrence’s fidelity to the pope, whom the deacon longed to follow even to martyrdom.

The burial of Sixtus in the cemetery of Callixtus is already recorded in a Roman calendar of 354, and his name is mentioned in the Roman Canon, the First Eucharistic Prayer. They died on August 6, the day on which the Church now celebrates the Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord, and their memorial falls on the following day. Sixtus II and his companions have been venerated since antiquity, without formal canonization.