St. Hippolytus, Antipope

[c. 170–c. 236] FEAST DAY: August 13

A few days before Pope John Paul II died, another “pope” passed away in Spain. Clemente Domínguez y Gómez, who called himself Pope Gregory XVII, died March 22, 2005. Domínguez y Gómez believed the Church of Rome was so hopelessly corrupted by Freemasons, Communists, and heretics that he and his followers were the only true Catholics left in the world. In 1978, he proclaimed himself pope.

Domínguez y Gómez was not the only antipope of our time: there is another, living in an undisclosed location, probably somewhere in the western United States. In 1998 a group calling itself the True Catholic Church elected Father Lucian Pulvermacher, O.F.M. Cap., pope. The conclave was held in a remote cabin in Montana. Since most of the electors—all lay men and women—could not make the journey to such an isolated location, they phoned in their votes. Father Pulvermacher took the name Pius XIII.

As antipopes go, Gregory XVII and Pius XIII have been harmless. Farcical, certainly, and a little sad, but since their influence doesn’t extend beyond a handful of oddballs they do no injury to the Catholic Church or to society at large. During the Middle Ages it was a different story.

Between 1058 and 1449 twenty-two antipopes afflicted the Church. Unlike the eccentrics who claim to be pope today, the medieval antipopes were ambitious, unprincipled men whose grab for power caused disruption throughout the Catholic world. The worst was the Great Schism, a traumatic period that dragged on from 1378 until 1419, when there were two, and then between 1406 and 1417 three, rival popes. The situation was so confusing even saints had a hard time determining who was the legitimate Holy Father: St. Catherine of Siena backed one contender, while St. Vincent Ferrer backed another.

On a day-to-day basis the antipopes’ effect on the Church proved disastrous. Rival popes created rival colleges of cardinals; each insisted that papal revenues belonged to them. When a diocese needed a new bishop, or a monastery a new abbot, each pope made an appointment, so two or three men showed up at a cathedral or an abbey, each claiming that the office belonged to him.

And then there were the spiritual issues. In theological debates the pope declared what was true doctrine and what was heresy. The spiritual authority of bishops and archbishops came through him. He disciplined wayward priests and princes, granted indulgences, canonized saints, and approved new religious orders. But only a legitimate pope could exercise such authority. In the next world, what would happen to Catholics who gave their allegiance to the wrong pope? It was a question that tormented consciences in every corner of Christendom.

Given the disgrace to the Church and what was at stake for the ordinary Catholic, it comes as a shock to learn that the first antipope appeared in 217. His name was Hippolytus, the most brilliant theologian in Rome, a man of limitless ego, a rigorist who did not know the meaning of the words “compassion” or “forgiveness.” Faults and foibles aside, Hippolytus enjoyed a wide-ranging reputation as a man who grasped subtle distinctions in any theological argument. About the year 212 when Origen, the most learned Christian theologian of the time, traveled to Rome from his home in Egypt, he made a point of going to hear Hippolytus preach.

Hippolytus began his slide into schism during the reign of Pope St. Zephyrinus (reigned 198/9–217). In one of his books, Philosophymena, Hippolytus writes off Zephyrinus as a man of no education. Compared to Hippolytus, the new pope probably was a mediocre scholar. Certainly he could not follow Hippolytus’s complex theories on the relationship between God the Father and God the Son, nor did he try. Zephyrinus affirmed, in simple terms, what the Church had always taught: that there was one God in three Divine Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. More intense theological speculation of the type Hippolytus enjoyed did not interest the pope—as long as it was not heresy.

But Zephyrinus the dullard pope was not the only person troubling Hippolytus. He had an irrational hatred for Callixtus, a former slave, embezzler, and troublemaker who had repented and been appointed by Zephyrinus as supervisor of the Christian cemeteries outside Rome. (St. Callixtus’s story is told in detail in the preceding chapter.) When Zephyrinus died in 217, the Roman clergy elected Callixtus pope. This was too much for Hippolytus. He believed that he should have been elected. As he nursed his grudge, he convinced himself and others that Callixtus held unorthodox opinions about the nature of Jesus Christ, and that he was corrupting the Church by absolving penitent adulterers and fornicators and readmitting to the Church heartbroken Christians who, out of fear of torture and death, had caved under the pressure of the Roman authorities and denied their faith. With the backing of other anti-Callixtus Christians in Rome, Hippolytus severed his ties to the Church and permitted his followers to elect him pope.

Five years later a pagan mob attacked and murdered Callixtus in the streets of Rome’s Trastevere neighborhood. Yet Hippolytus did not relinquish his claim to the papacy. The orthodox Roman clergy elected St. Urban I pope. During this peaceful reign (Urban is one of the few early popes not to have died a martyr) Hippolytus still adamantly refused to return to the Church. In 230 St. Pontian was elected pope, and five years later Rome got a new emperor, Maximinus. Almost immediately the emperor launched a new persecution of Christians, taking special care to target the leaders of the Church. Pope Pontian and the antipope Hippolytus were both seized in the roundup and deported to the mines in Sardinia. For the sake of the Church, Pontian resigned the papacy so a new pope could be elected. This act of selfless concern for the good of the Church appears to have pricked Hippolytus’s conscience. In Sardinia he repented his schism and begged Pontian to reconcile him to the Church.

Within a few months of Pontian’s resignation and Hippolytus’s repentance, both men died of the harsh treatment they suffered in the mines. Pope St. Fabian (reigned 236–250) arranged for the bodies of the two martyrs to be brought back and buried in Rome, where the Christians of the city accepted the onetime antipope’s repentance, forgave him his schism, and venerated him as a saint—thus showing themselves to be more like Callixtus than Hippolytus.