Sts. Cornelius and Cyprian

Sts. Cornelius and Cyprian are honored together as two great pastors and martyrs of the third-century Church, bound in life by friendship and shared trials and in death by their witness of blood. Cornelius governed the Roman Church as pope from 251 to 253, in the difficult aftermath of persecution, when the Church had to decide how to receive back those who had fallen away under threat of death; against the rigorism of the antipope Novatian, he upheld the mercy of reconciliation for the repentant, and he was exiled by the emperor and died a martyr.

Cyprian, bishop of Carthage in North Africa and one of the most influential of the Latin Fathers, was Cornelius's staunch ally and correspondent, defending the unity of the Church and the authority of the lawful pope. A brilliant writer whose treatises on the Church and on Christian life are read to this day, Cyprian shepherded his flock through plague and persecution until he too was martyred, beheaded at Carthage in 258 under the Emperor Valerian. The Church, which named Cornelius in the Roman Canon of the Mass, keeps the memory of the two friends together on 16 September.