Pope St. Caius

Pope St. Caius, also called Gaius, governed the Roman Church from 283 to 296, one of the longer reigns of the early papacy, falling in a period of relative peace for the Christians of Rome in the years before the great persecution of Diocletian broke out. Tradition held that he was of Dalmatian origin and a kinsman of the Emperor Diocletian himself, though this cannot be confirmed.

Little is known with certainty of his pontificate, from an age of scant records, but tradition credits him with ordering the sequence of ecclesiastical grades, or ranks, through which a man was to pass, from porter and lector up through the minor orders and the diaconate, before being ordained to the priesthood and the episcopate, a discipline that shaped the Church's ministry for centuries. He was buried in the catacomb of St. Callistus, where an inscription bearing his name was found. Long venerated as a martyr, though the peaceful character of his times makes this uncertain, he died in 296, and his memory is kept on 22 April.