Saint Sylvester I, Pope & Confessor

Saint Sylvester I was Bishop of Rome from the year 314 until his death on the thirty-first of December in 335, more than twenty years of fruitful peace. His pontificate spanned one of the great turning points in the Church’s history, for he held the See of Peter in the very years when the persecutions ended and the Church, so long hidden and afflicted, could at last worship openly. His feast, kept on the seventh day within the Octave of the Nativity, closes the civil year in the light of Christmas.

A pope of the peace of the Church

Saint Sylvester became pope shortly after the Emperor Constantine, by the Edict of Milan, had granted peace and freedom to the Christians. Under his long rule the Church in Rome began to flourish in the open: great basilicas rose, among them the churches that would become Saint John Lateran and Saint Peter’s, and the faithful gathered for worship without fear. During his pontificate, too, the first great Council of the Church was held at Nicæa in the year 325, which professed against the Arian error that the Son of God is true God, consubstantial with the Father; the Roman See was represented there by Sylvester’s legates.

Because he is honoured as a confessor rather than a martyr, the Church remembers Saint Sylvester not for a death by violence but for a long life of faithful service. He is, in a sense, a witness to the new day that dawned for the Church: the shepherd who guided her from the catacombs into the freedom of public worship, and who laboured to order her life in time of peace as his predecessors had guarded her in time of blood.

His witness today

Many later legends gathered about the name of Saint Sylvester, as often happens with the great figures of the early Church; their particulars cannot be confirmed by history, and the Church holds rather to what is sure: that he governed the Roman Church for some two decades in a momentous age and died in the peace of Christ. The collect of his feast asks that the venerable solemnity of blessed Sylvester, the Lord’s Confessor and Bishop, may increase in us both devotion and salvation. Falling on the last day of the year, his feast invites the faithful to give thanks for the year past and to entrust the year to come to God, in the company of the saints who served his Church.

Patronage

He is venerated among the early popes of Rome, and his feast on the last day of the year is kept in many places with thanksgiving for the year that has passed.