This pope is remembered as the Bishop of Rome who reigned during the time when Christianity became not only tolerated by the Roman Empire but also its official religion.
It was also during this early period of the 4th Century that some of the greatest and most important of the Roman basilicas were built.
St Silvester succeeded St Miltiades as pope and Butler’s Lives of the Saints tells us that it was probably to the former that Constantine gave the palace of the Lateran. There, the Pope set up his cathedra and established the Lateran basilica as the cathedral church of Rome. In this pontificate the Emperor Constantine also built the first churches of St Peter on the Vatican hill, Holy Cross in the Sessorian palace and St Laurence outside the Walls.
The Liber Pontificalis states that St Silvester was the son of a Roman named Rufinus. He became Pope in 314, less than a year after the Edict of Milan granted freedom to Christians. According to legend, St Silvester both baptised Constantine and cured him from leprosy. In gratitude and in recognition of the petrine office, the Emperor granted numerous rights to the Pope and his successors and endowed the Church with the provinces of Italy. This story of the “Donation of Constantine” was embroidered and used for political and ecclesiastical ends during the Middle Ages and has been widely recognised as a fabrication. But one point of it – the baptism of Constantine by Silvester – still finds a place in the Roman Martyrology and Breviary.
Shortly after his succession St Silvester sent representatives to Arles for a synod to deal with the Donatist schism rather than attend himself. Again, in 325, he sent legates on his behalf to the Council of Nicaea, where the Arian heresy was condemned.
St Silvester built a church at the cemetery of Priscilla on the Salarian Way and was buried there in 335.
In 761 his relics were translated by Pope Paul I to St Silvester in Capite, which later became the national church of English Catholics in Rome.
His feast of December 31 has been observed in the Western Church since at least the 13th Century and he is also honoured in the East on January 2 as the first Roman Pontiff after the Church emerged from the catacombs.