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Decius launched an official pogrom against the Church. Leading Christians were rounded up, and forced to offer sacrifice, in return for which they were given a certificate of compliance. Bishops and other leaders were specially targeted, and many of these behaved with great courage. Pope Fabian (236–50) was among the first to be arrested, and died from brutal treatment in prison. But there was also mass surrender – the Church’s very success in recruiting huge numbers of thesuperficially committed backfired, and all over the empire Christians queued up to comply with the law. The overworked officials in charge of the sacrifices had to turn crowds away, telling them to come another day.
    Christianity laid immense weight on the value of suffering for the faith. The word martyr means ‘witness’, and the martyr’s death was the ultimate witness to the truth. By contrast, those who broke under persecution, offering the pinch of incense or the libation to the gods which the Roman state made the test of good citizenship, or those who simply surrendered the holy books or vessels of the Church – these people were considered apostates who had sacrificed their salvation. Opinion was bitterly divided about their ultimate fate and, more pressingly, about whether they could ever again be restored to membership of the Church. In Africa, the Christian community would eventually split down the middle on the issue. A hard-line party emerged in the fourth century, called Donatists after one of their leaders. They believed that any contact with lapsed clergy, including those traditores or traitors who without offering pagan sacrifice had nevertheless handed over books or Church goods, contaminated a church and all its members, and invalidated the sacraments which were administered in it. The Donatists formed a separatist pure Church, with their own elders and bishops.
    The Roman church had its own bitter experience of persecution, and of both heroism and failure under persecution. Both experiences were manifest in its bishops. To the heroism of Pope Fabian was added that of Pope Sixtus II (257–8), arrested in 258 while presiding over worship in one of the funerary chapels in the catacombs. To avoid reprisals against his congregation he surrendered himself to the officers in charge of the raid, and was summarily beheaded with his deacons. By contrast, in the later persecution under Diocletian in 303, Pope Marcellinus (296–304?) would cave in to pressure. He surrendered copies of the scriptures and offered sacrifice to the gods. He died a year later in disgrace, and the Roman church set about forgetting him.
    In Rome as in Africa, hard- and soft-line responses to the problem of the lapsed developed. In the wake of Pope Fabian’s death, the church in Rome delayed electing another bishop till persecution eased. In the interim, the brilliant presbyter Novatian played a leading role in running the church, and all the indications are that he expected to become bishop in due course. Instead, the majority of the clergy and their lay supporters elected a far less able man,Cornelius (251–3). Novatian refused to accept the election, and his supporters had him consecrated by three bishops from the south Italian countryside: he set up as a rival to Cornelius. The key to this fiasco almost certainly lay in the two men’s attitudes to the lapsed. Novatian was a hard-liner, believing that those who had denied the faith could never again be received into the Church, while Cornelius favoured the restoration of the repentant after they had done appropriate penance. It seems likely that the less able man was elected to implement this more realistic and humane pastoral policy.
    Cornelius was a mild and unambitious man, who basked in the support of his fellow bishops – he gathered sixty of them at Rome to back his claims over those of Novatian, and collected letters of communion from those further afield. In particular, he won the approval of