A short episcopate in a bad year Taken in the Cemetery
Editor's note
Sixtus the Second was bishop of Rome for about eleven months. He inherited a quarrel that had nearly split the Latin churches in two, and he handled it by declining to press it. Then Valerian's second edict arrived and he was dead within the month. His feast on the tenth of August, kept with his archdeacon Lawrence, is one of the oldest fixed commemorations in the Roman church.
He became bishop of Rome around the end of August in the year two hundred and fifty seven. What he found waiting for him was the rebaptism controversy: his predecessor Stephen had come close to breaking communion with the churches of Africa and of Asia Minor over whether converts from heresy must be baptized again, and the letters on both sides had grown hot enough that a schism between Rome and Carthage was a live possibility.
Sixtus let it cool. He did not surrender Rome's position and he did not enforce it, and communion with Africa held. Cyprian, who had been Stephen's opponent in the matter, wrote of him warmly, and the deacon Pontius, in his Life of Cyprian, calls him a good and peaceable bishop. It is a small thing to have done and it prevented a large disaster.
The sixth of August
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