The Lapse and the Repentance
The episode at the center of Marcellinus' life is his lapse under the Diocletianic persecution. The tradition received in the East holds that, having encouraged others to endure torture for Christ, he himself gave way to fear upon his arrest, burned incense, and offered sacrifice to idols. The emperor responded by treating him as a friend and arraying him in splendid robes.
What follows is the heart of his commemoration as a saint. Weeping bitterly and stricken with remorse, he presented himself in sackcloth and ashes before an assembly of bishops and presbyters, confessing his fall and submitting himself to judgment. By the synaxarion's account the assembly recalled that even the Apostle Peter had denied Christ and repented. Marcellinus pronounced sentence upon himself, stripping himself of the priestly dignity he judged himself unworthy to hold.
He then went to the emperor, threw down the garments he had been given, and openly declared his regret for renouncing Christ. This second, public confession before the persecutor is what the tradition honors as the act sealing his repentance.
Martyrdom and Companions
Enraged by the open recantation of his apostasy, the emperor had Marcellinus tortured and sentenced to death. By the account preserved in the Eastern tradition, he prayed to Christ, who receives repentant sinners, and willingly laid his head beneath the sword.
He did not suffer alone. The holy martyrs Claudius, Cyrinus, and Antoninus were beheaded together with him, and the Orthodox commemoration on June 7 names them alongside him.
Relics & Shrines
According to the tradition, Marcellinus' body was left exposed after his death. The synaxarion relates that the Apostle Peter appeared in a vision to Bishop Marcellus, directing that the body be buried with honor, and that it was then interred in a crypt along the Via Salaria.
Western sources record the burial in the cemetery of Priscilla on the Via Salaria. The Liber Pontificalis gives the date of burial as April 26, 304, while the Liberian Catalogue records October 25; the two sources do not agree.
Disputed History and Veneration
Marcellinus is one of the more disputed figures of the early papacy. He is absent from several of the oldest liturgical records, including the Martyrologium Hieronymianum and the Depositio episcoporum, an omission that has fueled discussion of his conduct during the persecution. The principal source for the story of his lapse is the Liber Pontificalis, which drew on now-lost Acts of Saint Marcellinus.
In the early fifth century the Donatist bishop Petilianus of Cirta charged that Marcellinus and his clergy had handed over the holy books and offered incense to idols. Augustine of Hippo disputed the accusation. A later set of documents associated with a council at Sinuessa, fabricated in the early sixth century, has the council decline to try Marcellinus on the principle that the first See is judged by none. Modern historians regard the circumstances of his fall and even the fact of his martyrdom as uncertain.
In the Western calendar he was long commemorated with Saint Cletus on April 26, an observance removed in 1969. In the Orthodox tradition, transmitted through the synaxaria and the Prologue of Ohrid of Saint Nikolai Velimirovic, he is honored on June 7, the date kept in the Serbian Orthodox Church.
