Sts. Cornelius and Cyprian

On September 16 the Church honors Pope Cornelius and St. Cyprian of Carthage, martyrs of the mid-third-century persecution, whose friendship and correspondence shaped the Church's understanding of penance and unity. Cornelius was elected Bishop of Rome in March 251, after a fourteen-month vacancy caused by the Decian persecution. Cyprian was Bishop of Carthage, the leading church of North Africa, from 248 until his martyrdom in 258.

The persecution of the Emperor Decius (250) had created the lapsi crisis: Christians who had sacrificed to pagan gods to save their lives now sought readmission to the Church. The rigorist party, led by the antipope Novatian, held that the lapsed could never be forgiven. Cornelius and Cyprian took the moderate position — that the lapsed could be readmitted after a period of penance. Cornelius convened a synod of sixty bishops that confirmed his election and excommunicated Novatian. Cyprian held a council at Carthage that sided with Rome. Their correspondence on the unity of the Church and the pastoral care of the lapsed is among the earliest surviving papal epistolary exchange. Cyprian's treatise De Ecclesiae Catholicae Unitate — "On the Unity of the Catholic Church" — was written in this controversy; its most famous line, "He can no longer have God for his Father, who has not the Church for his mother," comes from it.

Cornelius was exiled to Centumcellae (modern Civitavecchia) by the Emperor Trebonianus Gallus and died in June 253, either from the hardships of banishment or by beheading. He was buried in the Catacomb of Callixtus on the Appian Way, near the chapel of the popes; a Latin inscription, "Cornelius Martyr," marks his tomb. At Rome, a 13th-century mosaic of Cornelius is set in the basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere.

Cyprian was arrested on September 14, 258, tried before the proconsul Galerius Maximus, and beheaded at Carthage the same day. The public examination is preserved verbatim in the Acta Proconsularia: when the proconsul read his sentence, Cyprian answered, "Thanks be to God." He removed his garments, knelt, prayed, blindfolded himself, and was beheaded by the executioner's sword — the bishop's death that gave the Church the phrase ad gladium, "to the sword." He was buried by Christians near the place of execution. The churches erected over his tomb and the place of his death were destroyed in the Vandal invasions, and no intact shrine survives at Carthage (modern Tunis). His relics were scattered in the medieval period: Charlemagne reportedly transferred bones to France; Lyon, Arles, Venice, and Compiègne have claimed relics.

The two are commemorated together because Jerome held that both were martyred on September 14 — the original feast date. The 1969 calendar moved the joint memorial to September 16. Cyprian is patron of North Africa and of the Berbers; Cornelius is invoked against epilepsy and earache, and is patron of Kornelimünster near Aachen, whose abbey claims his head relic and was a major medieval pilgrimage site in the Rhineland.