The pope who confirmed the date of Christmas
Today in Papal History marks the day St. Julius I ascended to the throne, Pope Clement XII went to his eternal reward, and a mountaineer became pontiff in the early 20th Century.
337 A.D.
As is the case with most of the ancient pontiffs, we only know of Pope St. Julius I’s early life that he was a Roman by birth, born somewhere around 300 A.D., and that his dad’s name was Rusticus.
Aside from that, all we know is that Julius came of age at a key turning point in the life of the Church – that of course being the reign of the emperor Constantine the Great and the legalization of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire.
In the 20 years before Julius ascended to the Chair of Peter, Constantine had commenced not only returning confiscated properties to the Catholic Church, but had embarked on a building spree that not only beautified and expanded worship and gathering spaces, but also helped the no-longer-underground Church to grow. Historian Glen Thompson calculated that the Church in Rome during Pope Cornelius’ reign decades earlier in the 250s AD had around “forty to fifty groupings equivalent to parishes and a total of at least 10,000 adherents” – so when Julius I was made pope on February 6, 337 AD, it would have been substantially larger, not to mention much more influential.
Julius had been in office not even four months before Constantine died, so the new pope inherited a Church not only now dealing with three petty, warring imperial sons – Constantine II, Constans, and Constantius II – but a Church that was also still struggling under the weight of the Arian controversy, the heresy declaring that Jesus Christ was a mere man, and not divine. It had been decisively condemned in 325 at the Council of Nicaea, but 2/3 of the world’s bishops – the proportion that held to Arian beliefs – don’t just go away overnight.
A dozen years after Nicaea, the drama continued – much to Julius’ joy, I’m sure. The bishops of the Eastern Church had been dead set on making Arianism the universal belief in their part of the Christian world as soon as the council closed, but Athanasius, the annoyingly-orthodox patriarch of Alexandria, stood in their way. The “anti-Athanasian party” as it became known, had successfully booted Athanasius from office once, but Constantine II managed to re-install him in his post in late 337.
The bishops in opposition weren’t about to give up, and this is where Julius comes in. Athanasius’ haters sent a letter to the pope regaling him with all sorts of trumped-up criminal and immoral charges supposedly committed by the patriarch. Athanasius sent his own letter, but after the Eastern heretics scoffed, the pope thought it best if the two sides met in person, and summoned everybody to a showdown in the Eternal City.
And so Julius I convened a synod in Rome in 342. Only one side showed up, as it turned out – and Athanasius was there basically because he had no place else to go, having been banished from Alexandria by his enemies for a second time. Rome, to its credit, recognized him as a legitimate bishop. The Eastern bishops, instead of arriving themselves, wrote a letter to Julius explaining their absence – and he was none too pleased, mainly because they wrote with the tone of arrogant, petulant children, to say nothing of their disrespect of the papacy itself.
The letter that Julius wrote back is, incredibly, still in existence – and so we can hear Julius’ incredulity as he writes back to the bishops to rebuke them, saying:
“I have read your letter which was brought to me by my Presbyters Elpidius and Philoxenus, and I am surprised to find that, whereas I wrote to you in charity and with conscious sincerity, you have replied to me in an unbecoming and contentious temper; for the pride and arrogance of the writers is plainly exhibited in that letter.
Yet such feelings are inconsistent with the Christian faith; for what was written in a charitable spirit ought likewise to be answered in a spirit of charity and not of contention. And was it not a token of charity to send Presbyters (priests) to sympathize with them that are in suffering, and to desire those who had written to me to come thither, that the questions at issue might obtain a speedy settlement, and all things be duly ordered, so that our brethren might no longer be exposed to suffering, and that you might escape further calumny?
But something seems to shew that your temper is such, as to force us to conclude that even in the terms in which you appeared to pay honour to us, you have expressed yourselves under the disguise of irony. The Presbyters also whom we sent to you, and who ought to have returned rejoicing, did on the contrary return sorrowful on account of the proceedings they had witnessed among you.
And I, when I had read your letter, after much consideration, kept it to myself, thinking that after all some of you would come, and there would be no need to bring it forward, lest if it should be openly exhibited, it should grieve many of our brethren here.
But when no one arrived, and it became necessary that the letter should be produced, I declare to you, they were all astonished, and were hardly able to believe that such a letter had been written by you at all; for it is expressed in terms of contention rather than of charity.”
A couple things of note here, of course, about Julius’ character. One, he clearly isn’t afraid of speaking bluntly to his sons who act in open disobedience (The Church would surely be in a better place if all of her bishops had such candor). But secondly, and to my mind more importantly, at the end notice that Julius held out until the very last minute before exposing these bishops’ pride and arrogance to the rest gathered in Rome – showing his willingness to have been wrong, to have potentially misunderstood, or to at the very least give the writers a chance to rethink their words and seek forgiveness by coming to Rome in person.
Such mercy shows Julius’ character, because heck, in a charged time like that – and not to excuse acting in un-charity – no one would probably have blamed him for flying off the handle a bit.
In any case, Julius was on the side of Athanasius to his own mortal end, and succeeded in finally restoring him to Alexandria in 346, but sadly the great bishop would again be exiled not once, not twice, but THREE more times by Arian troublemakers of all stripes – before finally being able to return to Alexandria unmolested and live out the rest of his days in relative peace, in 366, 14 years after Julius’ death.
One of the lasting legacies of that particular episode in history is that it points to the early Church’s reverence for the primacy of the Bishop of Rome over the whole of Christendom. We can see this by Julius all but scoffing in that same letter back to the Eusebian bishops when he said, “Are you ignorant that the custom has been for word to be written first to us, and then for a just decision to be passed from this place?” (emphasis added)
…”this place” referring to the Chair of St. Peter, and the rest meaning that it was pretty well established already by then that the pope had the final say.
Aside from the Arian drama, sadly little else is known about Julius’ 15 years as Bishop of Rome. We do know, however, that he was a builder of the Church – both in architecture and in population. He constructed two basilicas – those now known to us as Santa Maria in Trastevere, and the Church of the 12 Apostles – as well as three other churches placed over cemeteries outside of the city of Rome, and during his time may have come the first calendar celebrating the feast days of the martyrs on specific days – an ancient version of the Roman Calendar we use today.
Julius died on April 12, 352, and was venerated as a saint soon thereafter.
Julius’ legacy, interestingly enough, is perhaps most popularly tied to the date of Christmas. To be fair, the documents from which this claim is pulled may not have been written by Julius himself, but the timing of when Catholicism began popularly celebrating the birth of Christ as its own specific feast day still coincides with Julius’ papacy.
Before Constantine legalized Christianity in 313, there really wasn’t a universal date for celebrating Christ’s birth. Church Fathers like Origen, St. Irenaeus, and Tertullian, all of whom were writing in the late 2nd and early 3rd century, didn’t list Christmas or its date on their collection of popular feast days.
That said, in 204 AD, Hippolytus of Rome did list December 25 as the birthdate of Jesus, and noted March 25 as the date of his death, to boot.
Bouncing back to the 300s, we do know for certain that Pope Liberius, who reigned just after Julius I, celebrated Christmas on December 25, and that the great saints Gregory Nazianzus and John Chrysostom preached sermons on Christmas in the 370s and 380s.
That means that it there’s definitely a chance that the official proclamation of December 25 as the official day to celebrate Christ’s birth fell during Julius’ papacy. The letter attributed to Julius – again, perhaps a forgery – bears 350 AD as the year in which the date was officially proclaimed.
The reason for December 25 as the birth of Christ wasn’t simply a shot in the dark – nor was it, as it seems basically everyone thinks nowadays, a copycat or “baptizing” of the pagan holidays of Saturnalia or Sol Invictus.
Odds are, ironically, that Sol Invictus was in fact a copycat of Christmas – given that it wasn’t an annual festival, and wasn’t even created until 274 AD. That’s 70 years after Hippolytus called dibs on December 25.
For Saturnalia, it’s likely that the proximity to Christmas was mere coincidence. Many cultures down through the ages have celebrated feast days for the change in seasons, and December 17 through December 23, when Saturnalia was celebrated, coincided with the winter solstice.
There are theories that the St. John the Baptist’s conception and birth held the key – the timing of Zechariah’s service in the temple when the angel announced John’s conception coincided with a specific Jewish feast when, if we add 6 months to it, corresponds to another feast, which happens to be about 40 weeks before the end of December.
Remember that Elizabeth was six (6) months pregnant when Mary came to her with Jesus newly in her womb.
Pope Benedict XVI, in his book Spirit of the Liturgy, while also rebuking the whole “pagan holiday copycat” thing, notes that Jesus’ birth is related to the date of his death, which Hippolytus, remember, had noted to be March 25. The Jews, notably, had a concept called “integral age” – dating all the way back to Moses himself – that a righteous person dies on the date of their conception.
So if Jesus died on March 25, then he was conceived that same day – 9 months after which, of course, is December 25.
Some may scoff, but it’s certainly reasonable to think God would fulfill such a concept to the fullest, isn’t it?
Anyway, thanks to Pope St. Julius I for setting that in stone.
1740 A.D.
Today in Papal History also marked the date that Pope #246 went to his eternal reward. Pope Clement XII, from the legendary Roman Corsini/Orsini family, died just 5 months shy of a decade in the Chair of Peter.
