St Silvester I

Silvester is remembered less for personal episodes than for the age in which he stood. He succeeded Pope Miltiades in 314, less than a year after the Edict of Milan had given freedom to Christianity, and so his pontificate belongs to the Church's first great emergence from persecution into public life. This life is at once careful and unsentimental about the later legends. The famous tale that Constantine was baptized by Silvester and in gratitude made over wide earthly dominion to the pope in the Donation of Constantine is treated as fabrication, however influential it later became in politics and pious storytelling.

What remains historical is still weighty enough: Silvester was represented at Arles in the Donatist dispute, sent legates to the Council of Nicaea, and governed Rome while Constantine was endowing the Church with public buildings and honour. His pontificate is linked especially with the Lateran, where the pope's cathedra and cathedral church were established, and with the first great Roman churches of the new peace, including the early basilicas of St Peter, Holy Cross, and St Laurence. Silvester was buried at the cemetery of Priscilla, and his feast remained the fitting close of the Western year: the pope of the moment when the Church came out of the catacombs into the daylight of history.