medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Perhaps a native of Rome (the _Liber Pontificalis_ says he was), Lucius succeeded St. Cornelius in June of 253 as bishop of that city. The ongoing but apparently highly selective persecution under the emperors Trebonianus Gallus and Volusian forced him into an immediate exile severe enough for St. Cyprian of Carthage, in one of his letters to Lucius, to call him a martyr. Upon the accession of the emperor Valerian in August of the same year Lucius returned to the Eternal City. He seems to have followed his predecessor's policy of readmitting, after a penance, Christians who had apostasized during the recent persecution.
Lucius died in the year 254. Despite the assertion of the _Liber Pontificalis_ that he suffered martyrdom by beheading, his absence from the _Depositio martyrum_ of the Chronographer of 354 (which latter, lacunose though it is, does record martyred bishops of Rome), his entry in the same source's _Depositio episcoporum_ (confessor bishops), and the fact that the edicts underlying the Valerianic persecution postdate Lucius' passing by several years conduce to the belief, enunciated by the Roman Martyrology in its revision of 2001, that this pope died a confessor.
Lucius was buried in the crypt of the popes in the Cemetery of Callistus. A portion of the brief identifying inscription at his resting place bearing his name (Loukis, in Greek as were all the burial inscriptions at this particular site) was found during de Rossi's excavation of this chamber in the later nineteenth century.
In 821 Paschal I translated bodily relics of Lucius to his newly renovated church of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere. His head (Lucius', not Paschal's) is said to have been translated to Denmark in about 1100 and to have been placed in Roskilde's then wooden cathedral. Understood to have been a martyr, Lucius became the diocese of Roskilde's patron saint; when the present (ex-)cathedral, the Roskilde Domkirke, was built starting in the late twelfth century it was dedicated to him. Here's Lucius as depicted on what is said to be the cathedral's oldest surviving seal:
http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fil:Roskildedomkirkessegl.jpg
TAN: What some still believe to be Lucius' head (it has been carbon-dated to somewhere in the years 340-431) now reposes in this early twentieth-century reliquary bust (1910) in Roskilde's Roman Catholic cathedral of St. Ansgar:
http://santiebeati.it/immagini/Original/43900/43900A.JPG
But wait! There's another in the Residenz in Munich:
http://tinyurl.com/p8phq2f
Perhaps one of these was Lucius' head when he was younger.
In the pseudo-Isidoran False Decretals item no. 46, a letter to bishops in Gaul and Spain, is attributed to Lucius.
Until the rearrangement of the Roman Calendar promulgated in 1969 Lucius' feast day fell on 4. March, the day on which he occurs in the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology. The present date of his commemoration in the Roman Martyrology (5. March) is that of his laying to rest as given in the aforementioned _Depositio episcoporum_ and in the so-called Liberian Catalogue (another fourth-century list preserved by the Chronographer of 354).
Best,
John Dillon
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