[Officium]
S. Stephen Pope and Martyr

[Name]
Stephen

[Lectio93]
This Stephen was a Roman, and exercised the Popedom in the reign of the Emperors Valerian and Gallienus. It was his ordinance which forbade Priests and Deacons ever to use their hallowed garments except in the Church. He forbade a re-baptism of such as had been baptized by heretics, writing to St. Cyprian in these words: Let us have no innovations, but only what hath been handed down unto us. He turned many to Christ, and, among them, the Tribune Olympius, with his wife Exuperia, and his son Theodulus, and the Tribune Nemesius, to whose blind daughter he had given sight, along with all his household. All these were martyrs for Jesus Christ. When the persecution of the Emperors was waxing dreader and more dread, Stephen gathered together the clergy, and exhorted them to be brave in lifting up their testimony, and himself celebrated Masses and Councils in the Catacombs. He was caught by some unbelievers, and haled to the temple of Mars, to do sacrifice to that idol, but he boldly said he would never pay to devils an honour which it behoved to give to God only. As he spake these words an earthquake made the image of Mars to fall down, and all the temple to tremble. All they that held Stephen fled, and the Pope went back to his own people in the cemetery of Lucina. He there delivered to them a discourse full of the Word of God, and gave them the Communion of the Sacrament of the Body of Christ. While he was finishing the Mass, the soldiers of the Emperor again brake in upon them, and his head was cut off as he sat in his chair. The reliques of the Martyr, along with the chair stained with his blood, were buried by the clergy in the cemetery of Callistus, upon the 2nd day of August, (in the year of our Lord 257.) He lived as Pope three years, three months, and twenty two days. He held two ordinations in the month of December, and in them ordained six Priests, five Deacons, and three Bishops.
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