DAMASUS, the name of two Popes.
Damasus I. stands thirty-ninth in the roll of bishops of Rome. Every one of the first fifty-six Popes has been canonized; and the subject of this notice is entitled to the style of St Damasus. It is stated that he was by birth a Spaniard; but the more authentic account is that he was born at Guimaraens, in Portugal, in or about the year 304. Other writers have maintained that, though of Portuguese extraction, he was born in Rome. It seems certain that he went thither at an early age; and, though he was forty-eight years old when deacon’s orders were conferred on him, he had at an early age been admitted to the ecclesiastical career as a “reader” and secretary of the church. And he is said in that capacity to have compiled the “Acts” of the martyrs Petrus and Marcellinus. The writer in the Biographic Universelie says that he succeeded St Liberius on the Papal throne, but this is an error. On the death of St Liberius, St Felix II. succeeded him, and reigned one year and three months; and on his death Damasus was elected, in 366. When St Liberius was exiled from Rome, Damasus accompanied him to Milan. He received priest’s orders, was made cardinal during the pontificate of Felix II., and in 366 was elected by the Roman clergy to the Papacy in the sixty-second year of his age. He died in 384....
The most important event of his papacy was the publication of the law made by the Emperor Valentinian in 370, to restrain the clergy from influencing their penitents to enrich them. This law of 370 is most important and noteworthy from having been the first of the long series of attempts to effect the same object, which, revived by Frederick II. and by Edward I. of England, have occupied the attention of the legislators of so many generations from the time of Damasus even to the present day. Valentinian ordered that ecclesiastics and monks should not frequent the houses of widows and single women. Confessors were prohibited from receiving any gift or legacy from their penitents, and all donations or bequests made in contravention of this law were declared to be null and void. Catholic writers represent this law as having been suggested to the emperor by the Pope. Anti-Catholic authors say that it was imposed on the Pope by the emperor; and it is impossible to avoid feeling that the latter is by far the more probable statement. In any case the law in question furnishes a highly curious and suggestive picture of the church as it was under St Damasus. And St Jerome himself, who had been invited to come to Rome by Damasus, and acted as his secretary, confesses that the clergy had by their conduct merited a law which placed them under restraints such as were not found necessary for mimes charioteers, and comedians.
Damasus had to go through a severe struggle for his throne with an Anti-pope named Ursinus or Urasinus. Of course the ecclesiastical writers represent the successful one of the antagonists to have been animated by the most sincere and heavenly-minded desires for peace and concord. But the pagan historian Ammianus, as quoted by Gibbon, as well as another authority cited by him, would go to show that the two competitors for the position of vicar of Christ were equally savage and ferocious; and that the 137 dead bodies found in the Liberian Basilica (the church of St Maria Maggiore), after a struggle between the parties, were due to the ferocity of the orthodox Pope’s adherents rather than to those of the Anti-pope.
Gibbon says that Damasus “had the good sense or the good fortune to engage in his service the zeal and-abilities of the learned Jerome, and the grateful saint has celebrated the merit and purity of a very ambiguous character.” The official ecclesiastical writers tell us nothing about the 137 dead bodies in the Liberian Basilica, but much of the sainted Pope’s decisions as to the nature of the Trinity, and inquire learnedly whether or no it were he who first ordered the Hallelujah to be sung in the Roman churches at Easter. It seems more certain that it was to him that the pagan prefect of Rome, Prsetextatus, replied, that he would become a Christian to-morrow if they would make him a bishop I
Damasus II. was a native of Bavaria, of the name of Papon, who became bishop of Brixen in Tyrol, and was elected the 155th Pope on the death of Clement II. in 1047, mainly by the influence of the Emperor Henry III. He reigned but twenty-three days, having died on the 8tli of August at Palestrina, whither he had gone to escape the heat of Rome. The shortness of his reign, and the fact that previously to his election he was an obscure stranger, have been the causes that very little is known about him.
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