We have but a few words to say on the authenticity of the facts inserted, besides the chronological notions, in the Catalogue of Liberius. First, they are very few in number. There is, at the pontificate of St Pius, a note on Hermas, the author of the book of The Shepherd, who is said to have been the brother of this Pope. This book is certainly by Hermas and still exists. The kinship of its author with St Pius is a question debated among the learned. At the article of St Pontian, there are a few lines in which it is said that he was relegated to Sardinia and that he was martyred there. Nothing is less suspect than this tradition, so simple and so unpretentiously recounted.
Of St Fabian, it is said that he divided the regions among the deacons and had constructions made in the cemeteries. We shall later prove the certainty of these particulars. What is said of Moses, Maximus and Nicostratus, as well as of Novatus and Novatian, is amply supported by the letters of St Cyprian. One can verify at the same source the facts alleged at the pontificate of St Cornelius. The note on the exile and return of St Lucius likewise presents no matter for contestation. No one doubts the persecution of Diocletian and Maximian, of which there is mention at the article of St Marcellinus.
Finally, nothing is easier to justify than the details inserted at the pontificate of St Julius concerning the construction of the basilicas which recognize him as their founder. We here conclude what we had to say on the Catalogue of Liberius; and we feel at the same time the need to repeat that, if we present this monument as ancient and venerable, we are far from concealing the imperfections it presents. There are some that must be put down to the account of the copyists, others that one must attribute to the injury of the times;
and several perhaps which will have come from the insufficiency of the records, which, in this or that circumstance, the compiler will have sought to supplement by conjectures more or less happy. The assignment of the consuls to certain pontificates is evidently faulty and several times casts a certain confusion into the years.
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Besides the general explanations we have just given, we are rather fond of the system of Father Henschenius, who conjectures that several times persons elevated to the Papacy, having for some years been vicars of their predecessor—as St Clement was of St Linus and St Cletus—one will have confused the year of their episcopal ordination with that of their accession to the Holy See; and no more than that would have been needed to engender a confusion become almost irremediable through the lapse of time.
Likewise, by adopting with moderation another idea of the learned Jesuit—strongly combated by Father Pagi inasmuch as it is false in its generality—we might explain some errors committed concerning the days and the months, by means of a common misunderstanding that would have taken for the day of the death of this or that Pope the day of his burial, inscribed for one reason or another in the calendar. We leave these hypotheses, moreover, for what they are;
but, having sometimes to combat and reform the Catalogue of Liberius in certain details, we owed to the public this frank explanation, which in our eyes in no way weakens the importance of this monument, one of the most authentic of all Christian antiquity.