Wednesday of the Fifth Week of Lent atSt Marcellus

As he lay dying in the stables to which he had been condemned to labor, the aged Pope Marcellus, I would hardly have imagined that this church in his name would one day stand on this site.  Elected in 308, he was faced almost immediately with the issue of the re-admittance to communion of those who had denied the faith in the persecutions, to which issue he responded by upholding the traditional period of penance.  Arrested some months later, he was made to work in the imperial stables just off of the main road which is now the Via del Corso.  Some traditions say that this had been the location of an oratory consecrated by him, turned into stables by the Romans to humiliate him and the Church.  After suffering in the difficult labor, he would die shortly thereafter.  In the late fourth and early fifth century, the first church was built here in his honor as part of a program to replace house churches with larger structures (From: Procedamus in Pacem, PNAC).