Sedition, murder, fighting, quarrelling, and strife.
Presently both [the Pope and the heretic] are exiled by the cruelty of the tyrant,
Although the Pope was preserving the bonds of peace inviolate.
He bore his exile with joy, looking to the Lord as his Judge.
And on the shore of Sicily gave up the world and his life.”
Having sufficiently considered the form of the inscription, let us now say a few words about its substance, which is important, because it restores to us a lost chapter of Church history. Every student knows how keenly contested in the early ages of the Church was the question as to the discipline to be observed towards those Christians who relapsed into an outward profession of Paganism under the pressure of persecution. There were some who would fain close the door of reconciliation altogether against these unhappy men (miseri), whilst others claimed for them restitution of all Christian privileges before they had brought forth worthy fruits of penance.
The question arose whenever a persecution followed after a long term of peace; for during such a time men’s minds were specially apt to decline from primitive fervour, and the number of the lapsed to increase. We are not surprised, therefore, to find the question agitated during the persecution of Decius in the middle of the third century. There is still extant a touching letter, written to St. Cyprian by the clergy of Rome at a time when the Holy See was vacant after the martyrdom of St. Fabian, which clearly defines the tradition and practice of the Church. In it they say that absolution was freely given to those of the lapsed who are in danger of death, but to others only when wholesome penance has been exacted; and they declare that “they have left nothing undone that the perverse may not boast of their being too easy, nor the true penitents accuse them of inflexible cruelty.” The same question arose under the same circumstances in the persecution of Diocletian. Pope Marcellus was firm in upholding the Church’s discipline, but he was resisted with such violence that public order was disturbed in the city by the strife of contending factions, and the Pope was banished by order of the Emperor Maxentius. This we learn from another inscription of Pope Damasus, who says that he wrote it in order that the faithful might not be ignorant of the merit of the holy Pontiff. Eusebius was the immediate successor of Marcellus, and the epitaph now before us is clearly a continuation of the same history, ending in the same punishment of the Pope, as the reward of his contention for the liberties of the Church. For it should be remembered that these Popes were driven from their see and died in exile, not because they refused to apostatize, but because they insisted on maintaining the integrity of ecclesiastical discipline. They may justly be reckoned, therefore, among the earliest of that noble army of martyrs, who, from those days even to our own, have braved every danger rather than consent to govern the Church in accordance with other than the Church’s rules.
It yet remains to make two further remarks upon the epitaph of Pope Eusebius before we leave it. The first is, that he is called a martyr, though it nowhere appears that he really shed his blood; but this is by no means the only instance in which the title of martyr is given in ancient documents to men who have suffered for the faith and died whilst those sufferings continued. And secondly, it is to be observed that although we have no record of the translation of the body of St. Eusebius from Sicily to Rome, there is no reason to doubt the fact. All the earliest monuments speak of him as buried in a crypt of the Cemetery of St. Callixtus, and although the law forbad the translation of the bodies of those who had died in exile unless the emperor’s permission had been previously obtained, the old lawyers tell us that this permission was freely given. Numerous examples teach us the great anxiety of the ancient churches to have their bishops buried in the midst of them; no doubt, therefore, the necessary permission was asked for, as soon as a change in the imperial policy towards the Church made it possible; and the body of St. Eusebius was recovered and brought to Rome soon after his death, just as that of one of his predecessors, St. Pontian, had been brought from Sardinia by St. Fabian.