The Little Peace of the Church

By Thomas V. Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Apr 27, 2026 | In Lives of the Popes

Previous installment

The popes in the middle of the third century experienced intense persecution by the emperors Decius and Valerius, but this suddenly gave way to a period of official and explicit toleration, which provided the Church with a foretaste of the lasting relief that was to come under Constantine.

24—St. Sixtus II (257-58)

St. Sixtus II was the first pope to share the name of a predecessor, but Sixtus was actually his name—not for another three centuries will we get to the first pope who changed his name after being elected. And it is this pope, not the first St. Sixtus, who is named in the Roman Canon.

Sixtus is said by the Liber Pontificalis to have been an Athenian philosopher who converted to Christianity during the persecutions of Decius and Valerius, but modern scholars argue that this was a misidentification of Pope Sixtus with a philosopher by the same name.

On the advice of St. Dionysius of Alexandria, Pope St. Sixtus restored peaceful relations with St. Cyprian and the African and Asian bishops after their clash with Pope St. Stephen over rebaptism of heretics (Dionysius had given the same counsel to Stephen, but to no avail). Thus Pontius, the deacon and biographer of St. Cyprian, called Sixtus “a good and peace-loving bishop”.

His pontificate took place during the persecution by Emperor Valerian, who commanded Christians to worship the Roman gods and forbade them to assemble in the catacombs. Soon after, the persecution became even more brutal, as Valerian ordered that all bishops, priests, and deacons be executed. While Sixtus was praying with his flock at a cemetery on the Appian Way near the Catacombs of Callistus, soldiers came and arrested him. St. Cyprian testifies, in a letter written only weeks afterward, to the pope’s martyrdom alongside four of his deacons: Sts. Januarius, Vincentius, Magnus, and Stephanus. The remainder of Rome’s seven deacons were soon to follow: Sts. Felicissimus and Agapitus were martyred that same day, and most famously, St. Lawrence was martyred four days after St. Sixtus.

St. Ambrose and Prudentius both relate a tradition that Sixtus and Lawrence had a final meeting as the pope was being led to his death. The Renaissance papal biographer Platina gives the story in brief:

As he was going to his punishment, the archdeacon Lawrence addressed him: “Where are you going without your son, father? Where are you hurrying without your attendant, noble priest?” Sixtus answered him: “I am not deserting you, son; greater battles are left to you for your faith in Christ. After three days you, minister, will follow me, your priest. In the meantime, if you have anything in your treasury, give it to the poor.”

Fra Angelico, Pope St. Sixtus II Consecrates St. Lawrence as Deacon

A century later, Pope St. Damasus I composed the following epitaph in Latin verse for St. Sixtus II, which was placed on his tomb in the Catacombs of St. Callistus:

At the time when the sword pierced the bowels of the Mother, I, buried here, taught as Pastor the Word of God; when suddenly the soldiers rushed in and dragged me from the chair. The faithful offered their necks to the sword, but as soon as the Pastor saw the ones who wished to rob him of the palm (of martyrdom), he was the first to offer himself and his own head, not tolerating that the (pagan) frenzy should harm the others. Christ, who gives recompense, made manifest the Pastor’s merit, preserving the flock unharmed.

25—St. Dionysius (259-68)

After the martyrdom of Sixtus, the intense persecution once again made it impossible to elect a new Bishop of Rome, resulting in an almost year-long papal interregnum. Finally St. Dionsyius, a Greek born in Calabria, was elected. He had previously been a priest of Rome and had taken part in the controversy over the baptism of heretics. Even before his pontificate, he corresponded with the illustrious Bishop of Alexandria of the same name, St. Dionysius the Great, who Eusebius says considered the Roman Dionysius to be a “learned and admirable man”.

Pope Dionysius’s reign coincided with a great change in the situation of the Church. The year after the pope’s election, the wicked Emperor Valerian was killed by the King of Persia. The new emperor, Gallienus, issued an edict of toleration, ending the persecution and granting legal recognition to the Church, so that she regained her properties of which she had previously been denied legal ownership—places of worship, cemeteries, etc.—and in this new situation, Dionysius was able to carry out a reorganization of the local Church.

Gallienus’s decree, the first of its kind regarding Christians, began what is called the “Little Peace of the Church”, a forty-year-long foreshadowing of the more lasting “Peace of the Church” later brought about by Constantine. Intervening between the two peaces would be the last and worst Roman persecution, the one inflicted by Diocletian.

Eusebius of Caesarea, who lived through all three periods, wrote of the Little Peace:

It is beyond our ability to describe in a suitable manner the extent and nature of the glory and freedom with which the word of piety toward the God of the universe, proclaimed to the world through Christ, was honored among all men, both Greeks and barbarians, before the persecution in our day.

Pope St. Dionysius’s most important doctrinal intervention was with the aforementioned St. Dionysius the Great, Bishop of Alexandria. The latter had written against the Sabellian heresy, which denied that the persons of the Trinity are truly distinct; but in combating this error, he fell into the opposite one of saying that the Son was made by and of a different substance than the Father. Some Alexandrians complained of this to the pope, so he held a synod in which he condemned both errors, and in a letter asked the bishop of Alexandria to explain himself. St. Dionysius of Alexandria immediately wrote books in which he either corrected his error or showed that this had not been his position all along, clearing his name with a perfectly orthodox expression of proto-Nicene Trinitarian doctrine.

Looking back on this papal intervention, St. Athanasius would write that Pope St. Dionysius had effectively condemned Arianism even before it existed, anticipating the Council of Nicaea by sixty years:

For Dionysius, Bishop of Rome, having written also against those who said that the Son of God was a creature and a created thing, it is manifest that not now for the first time but from of old the heresy of the Arian adversaries of Christ has been anathematised by all.

To which the Catholic Encyclopedia adds:

When we consider the vagueness and incorrectness in the fourth century of even the supporters of orthodoxy in the East, the decision of the Apostolic See will seem a marvellous testimony to the doctrine of the Fathers as to the unfailing faith of Rome.

Nor was St. Dionysius slack in deeds of charity, sending a large sum to the church in Cappadocia for the ransom of Christians who had been enslaved by the invading Goths.

26—St. Felix I (269-74)

During the papacy of St. Dionysius, the bishop of Antioch, Paul of Samosata, was found guilty of Trinitarian heresy and deposed by a local synod. The synod’s report was sent to Pope Dionysius but by the time it arrived, St. Felix had succeeded him. Felix wrote a letter in response, with statements on Trinitarian dogma and Christology countering Paul’s belief that Christ started out as a mere man who was filled with the divinity by adoption. Pope Felix’s letter was later tampered with by another heretical sect, but it would be quoted in the Acts of the Council of Ephesus in 431, in support of the unity of Christ’s divinity and humanity.

Interestingly, since Paul was refusing to leave his see, the Church appealed to the pagan Emperor Aurelian to enforce his deposition. The emperor, Eusebius writes, “decided the matter most equitably, ordering the building to be given to those to whom the bishops of Italy and of the city of Rome should adjudge it. Thus this man was driven out of the church, with extreme disgrace, by the worldly power.”

27—St. Eutychian (275-83)

We know almost nothing for certain about Pope St. Eutychian, and even the uncertainties are of little interest—such as his having allowed the blessing of grapes and beans on the altar.

28—St. Gaius (283-96)

We also know little about this pope, but at least there is an interesting legend of his martyrdom. St. Gaius is said to have been a native of Dalmatia, and somehow related to Emperor Diocletian. He is said to have hid in the catacombs as the Diocletian persecution ramped up, and then to have been captured and martyred alongside his brother and his niece (the legendary St. Susanna of Rome). However, this is unlikely, as Diocletian did not begin to persecute the Church until several years after Gaius’s death.