St. Sixtus, Pope of Rome

He became bishop of Rome at the end of August 257 and found the rebaptism controversy waiting for him. His predecessor Stephen had come close to breaking communion with Africa and with Asia Minor over whether converts from heresy must be baptized again, and the letters had grown hot enough that a schism was a live possibility.

Sixtus let it cool. He neither surrendered Rome's position nor enforced it, and communion held. St. Cyprian of Carthage, who had been Stephen's opponent in the matter, wrote of him warmly, and Cyprian's deacon Pontius calls him a good and peaceable bishop.

In the summer of 258 Valerian issued a second edict: clergy to be executed on identification rather than exiled, Christians of rank to lose their property and then their lives, and the cemetery assemblies outside the walls specifically forbidden.

On the sixth of August, 258, Sixtus was seated in the chair teaching at the liturgy in the cemetery of Praetextatus on the Appian Way when the soldiers came in. He was killed there with four of his deacons, Januarius, Vincent, Magnus and Stephen, and two more were taken and killed the same day. The seventh deacon, Lawrence, was not with him and was killed four days later.

Cyprian, in exile at Curubis, received the report and wrote it at once to the African bishops in the letter numbered eightieth in his collection, naming the day and adding that the persecution had reached the bishops and would reach him next. He was buried in the crypt of the popes in the cemetery of Callistus, where the pilgrims' graffiti are still on the plaster. The East keeps his memory on the tenth of August with Lawrence.