Dionysus (father)

Dionysus (Greece,?-Rome, December 26, 268) was the 25th.o pope of the Catholic Church from 259 to 268. His feast is celebrated on the day of his death, December 26.

After the death of Pope Sixtus II, the papal seat remained vacant for almost a year due to the persecutions that Emperor Valerian had unleashed against Christians.

A priest of great reputation in the Eastern Church, Dionysus moved to Rome as a priest during the pontificate of Stephen I, standing out at this stage in the controversy that the Church was experiencing over the issue of lapsi, those Christians who for fear of martyrdom had apostatized from their faith in Christ.

He fought Modalism, a doctrine that, following the teachings of Sabellio, proposed that the three persons of the Trinity were nothing but a matter of names, different ways of naming a single God. He also faced the subordinationists, who presented the Son as a creator being.

But the most relevant event of his pontificate was his confrontation with his namesake, the Bishop of Alexandria, Dionysus, whom he demanded to clarify his position on the accusation against him of having made some heretical statements regarding the trinitarian doctrine when defending tritheism, a doctrine that advocated the separation of the three persons of the Trinity into three different deities. This confrontation that is known in history as "the controversy of the two Dionysus", gave rise to an exchange of correspondence between Rome and Alexandria in which Dionysius of Alexandria wrote his "Apology and Refutation", defending the orthodoxy of his ideas by reducing the problem to a simple question of semantics between Eastern Christians who used Greek as their liturgical language and Western Christians who used Latin.

Dionysius reorganized the Roman parishes and obtained freedom for the Christians from Gallienus.

St. Dionysius died on December 26, 268 and was buried in the Catacombs of St. Callixtus.