So the only new words in today’s Mass are one prayer, and the prayer hands us a title. Zephyrinus, it says, was constituted shepherd of the whole Church. Whoever wrote it chose to ask God for forgiveness on the flock first and protection second, in that order, and then named the office as a shepherd of the whole Church rather than of the sound part of it.

Start with who he actually was, because the record is thin and honest about being thin. The Catholic Encyclopedia’s account of Pope St. Zephyrinus gives him nineteen years, from 198 to his death on 20 December 217. He brought a man named Callistus to Rome from Antium, made him a deacon, and put him in charge of the community’s burial ground on the Via Appia, which is why that catacomb still carries Callistus’s name and not his own. Two decrees the old papal chronicle credits him with are dismissed by the same article as attributed to him, in its own words, arbitrarily and without historical basis.

That is nearly the whole of it. A shepherd of the whole Church for nineteen years, and the durable achievement under his name is a cemetery that got named after his deacon. Being shepherd of the whole Church evidently did not require leaving much of a paper trail. He is the kind of figure who survives in history only because somebody quarrelled with him loudly enough to leave a record.

Somebody did. Rome in those years was split over how to speak about God and Christ together, and the encyclopedia lays out both camps: the presbyter Hippolytus teaching that the divine Logos who became man in Christ differs in everything from God, and Sabellius and Cleomenes insisting on the absolute unity of God with Christ’s incarnation as another manifestation of the one God. Both sides believed the other was destroying the faith. Both wanted the shepherd of the whole Church to say so out loud.

He would not. What Zephyrinus said, in the article’s summary, was that he acknowledged only one God and this was the Lord Jesus Christ, but that it was the Son and not the Father who had died. Then he stopped. He declined to issue the sweeping condemnation Hippolytus demanded, and the encyclopedia offers a reason that is not flattery: the error was not at first clearly evident, and Hippolytus’s own doctrine presented real difficulties against the tradition of the Church.

Read that again, because it is the pivot of the entire day. The man asking for the condemnation was himself holding a position the Church would later find hard to square. A shepherd of the whole Church who had issued the demanded ruling would have ruled in favour of the wrong side of it. A shepherd of the whole Church is sometimes doing the job precisely when he says less than the loudest man in the room wants. His refusal looks like weakness in every account written by his opponents, and it was the only thing standing between the Church and a formal endorsement of a mistake.

Hippolytus did not take it well. He grew, the article says, constantly more irritated and angry against the pope and particularly against the deacon Callistus, and when Callistus was elected to succeed Zephyrinus, St. Hippolytus of Rome left the communion of the Roman Church, had himself elected by his small band of followers, and set up a rival body which he called the Catholic Church. A learned, rigorous, doctrinally exacting man walked out and founded a purer church, and he took the name with him.

Apply the test this ministry applies to everything, the one first set out in By Their Fruits You Shall Know Them. Here is a doctrine of the Church as something to be kept clean, and here is what it grew: a second bishop, a second altar, a smaller congregation, and a name held by two rival bodies at once. The demand for exactness produced division, on its own evidence, in under twenty years. The fruit of rigour was a rival altar; the fruit of a shepherd of the whole Church who would not rule was a Church still in one piece. And the shepherd of the whole Church who refused to make the ruling kept the whole in one piece by doing almost nothing that could be written down.

Now the part that makes today’s prayer more than a compliment paid to a dead administrator. Around 235 both Hippolytus and Pope Pontian were banished to Sardinia, and both died there. Their remains were brought back to Rome on the same day, the thirteenth of August, and the same article says the Roman Church revered them equally as martyrs, calling that certain proof that Hippolytus had made his peace with that Church before his death.

He came back. The man who declared that the shepherd of the whole Church was no shepherd of his, who took the name and founded the rival, ended up on the same cart, honoured the same day, by the body he had left. The shepherd of the whole Church he had publicly refused turned out to be the shepherd he came home to.

This archive kept him thirteen days ago on his own feast, in Hippolytus and Cassian, and the dramatic officer-and-nurse story attached to him there is legend, as the encyclopedia says plainly. The reconciliation is not legend. The reconciliation is the part the sources are confident about.

One caution, because this ministry does not smooth over its own name confusions. The Hippolytus of August 13 is this Roman presbyter and writer. The Hippolytus of Porto commemorated four days ago in The Throne of Grace is a different man, and the encyclopedia is not sure he existed. Same name, three centuries of muddle, and worth keeping straight.

Hold the two facts side by side. A shepherd of the whole Church is prayed for on August 26, and the man who denied he was any such thing is honoured on August 13. Neither feast cancels the other. The whole turned out to be wide enough to hold the pope who would not draw the line and the scholar who drew it and walked past it, and it held them both by outlasting the quarrel rather than by winning it.

There is a third person in this story who is easy to skip. A confessor named Natalius, a man who had suffered for the faith, was talked into becoming the bishop of a breakaway sect for a hundred and seventy denarii a month. He had a salary, a title, and a following. Then, the account says, he received many warnings in dreams, repented, and was reconciled to the Church, which took him back without any record of conditions attached.

A hundred and seventy denarii a month is not a detail anybody would invent to flatter anybody, and it tells you what the shepherd of the whole Church was for. Not to certify the pure. To keep a door that a paid schismatic bishop could walk back through, and a shepherd of the whole Church who bolts that door has resigned the office.

There is a story sometimes told of a woman whose congregation split in two over a question of discipline, after she had already been in that building fifty-one years. Half the people left and started meeting in a school hall a mile away. She went to the early service in the old building and walked to the late service in the school hall, every Sunday, for nine years, and she did it in weather that had no business being walked in at her age. When somebody finally asked her to explain herself, she said she was not going to sit down and decide which half of her church she was going to stop praying with.

She was not making a theological point and she would have been embarrassed to hear it called one. She was doing, on foot, with a handbag, what the prayer for Zephyrinus asks God to do. Look forgivingly on the flock, then protect it, and treat the whole thing as one flock while the argument runs. That is what a shepherd of the whole Church looks like at ground level, and it is usually somebody with no authority at all who is holding the position.

The lifelong faithful get talked about as though they were the easy case, the people who never had to decide anything. That is almost the opposite of true. Stay in one place for fifty years and you will watch people be put out, watch the reasons change, and watch the same room use the same language to include you and exclude somebody you love. The ones who keep coming are not the ones who noticed least. They are the ones who decided that the whole of it was still theirs to keep praying in.

Every one of them has served as an unpaid shepherd of the whole Church at some point, usually on a morning nobody noticed.

Which brings us to what the last of today’s three prayers for Zephyrinus actually asks. It asks that the Church, guided and ruled, may receive an increase of liberty and may continue in religious integrity. Those two things are set down in one sentence, joined, as though the Church’s freedom and the Church’s integrity rose together. Nobody who has watched a congregation tighten up believes that is the default assumption.

The common assumption is the trade. Integrity costs liberty, holiness is bought by subtraction, and a smaller church is a purer one. That is exactly the belief Hippolytus acted on, and the fruit is in the record: a second church, a rival name, and a man who spent his best years as the bishop of a faction. A shepherd of the whole Church cannot make that trade without losing the noun in his own title.

I will say plainly who this reaches, because the text has done the work. It reaches trans people, who in our own decade are the group most often held up as the price a church would have to pay for its integrity. The claim made against them is precisely the one in this history: that the whole cannot include them and stay whole. A shepherd of the whole Church does not get to hand back part of the flock and keep the title. Today’s answer is not a sentiment, it is a case file, and it says that the church which subtracted for the sake of purity is the one that broke.

That is a different argument from the one this ministry made on Sunday the sixteenth in The Letter Killeth, and the difference matters. There the problem was law used as a weapon, the letter turned against the person. Here the law is not the weapon at all. Here the impulse is protective, sincere, and doctrinally serious, and it still ends in schism, which is the harder version of the claim and the one worth having.

For anyone reading this with no faith in it, the whole argument holds with the theology removed. Any group that decides its standards are best defended by removing members will keep removing members, because the logic never contains a stopping rule. What it produces is a smaller group that is more certain and less able to do anything, and the people it removed do not stop existing. Yesterday’s offering, Faithful in a Little, made the neighbouring point about fear and what it grows, and this is the institutional version of the same failure.

None of which means a church has no standards. Zephyrinus did not say nothing. He said the thing he was sure of, that Christ is God and that it was the Son who died, and he declined to say the things he was not sure of yet. A shepherd of the whole Church who speaks only to the limit of what is actually known is not being vague, he is being accurate, and the accuracy is what kept the door open long enough for Hippolytus and Natalius to come back through it.

So here is what today asks, on a Wednesday with no readings of its own. Take the argument you are currently in, in your family or your parish or your own head, and ask whether your plan for winning it involves a smaller room at the end. If it does, you have chosen the strategy that broke the third-century Church, and the record on how that goes is very clear. Shepherd of the whole Church is a standard rather than a sentiment, and it is measured by the size of the room at the end. A shepherd of the whole Church starts from the flock as it actually is and works forward from there.

And if you are the one somebody else is planning to exclude, the prayer today is not on their side. It asks God to look at the flock forgivingly and to keep the whole of it in His protection, and it puts the forgiveness first, before any accounting of who deserved to be in the picture. That order is not an accident. Shepherd of the whole Church means the whole, including the part of it that walked out, and including you.

↑ The order resumes below.