THE LIVES AND TIMES OF THE POPES IN THE FIFTH CENTURY

 

SAINT INNOCENT I

A.D. 401-417

 

INNOCENT I, of Alba, in Montferrato, was the son of Innocent, and a cardinal-deacon created by Saint Damasus. He was elected pontiff at the close of 401. In 409 he went to Ravenna to converse with the Emperor Honorius and obtain from him the confirmation of the capitulation concluded between King Alaric and the senate of the city of Rome, besieged by Alaric, and sacked by him in the following year.

[The Abbé Francis Giusta, in his Journeys of the Popes, describes the principal journeys undertaken by the popes for the benefit of the Church. The first journey is that of Innocent I, to have an interview in 409 with the Emperor Honorius, then residing at Ravenna. Then come the journeys of Saint Leo to Attila, in Mantua, in 452; that of Hormisdas to Ravenna, to Theodoric, King of the Goths; that of Saint John I to Constantinople, to the Emperor Justinian, in 525; that of Agapetus to Constantinople, to the Emperor Justinian, in 536. In 652 Martin I was carried off from Rome, by order of the Emperor Constantius. In the eighth century Constantine went to Constantinople, to the Emperor Justinian II, in 710. Other journeys followed. Saint Zachary went to Turin, to Ravenna, to Pavia, and to Perugia, in 742, 743, and 750. Saint Stephen III went to France, to King Pepin, in 754. Saint Stephen V went to Rheims, to the Emperor Louis I, in 816. Gregory IV went to France in 832. John VIII went to Paris, to the Emperor Charles the Bald, in 877.

In the tenth century no pope left Rome. Saint Leo IX went to France in 1049, and to Germany in 1053. Victor II went to Germany, to the Emperor Henry, in 1057. Saint Gregory VII went to the castle of Canossa in 1077. A century later, in 1177, Alexander III went to Venice to treat for peace with the Emperor Frederic.

In the twelfth century there was no papal removal from Rome. In the thirteenth in 1223 Honorius III went to the congress with the Emperor Frederic II. Gregory X went to Lyons in 1274.

Clement V transferred the residence of the Holy See to France in 1306. Urban V went to Avignon, in Italy, in 1363. Gregory XI re-established the residence of the Holy See at Rome in 1376. Pius II went to Mantua in 1459. Julius II, in 1511, besieged La Mirandola. Leo X went to Bologna to confer with King Francis I in 1515. Paul III went to Savona in 1538, to Lucca in 1541, and to Busseto in 1543. Clement VIII went to Ferrara in 1598.

In the seventeenth century there was no papal journey. In the eighteenth century, in 1782, Pius VI went to Vienna. Pius VII went to Paris in 1804; in 1809 he was detained at Savona; in 1815 he went to Geneva. And, finally, Gregory XVI visited Ancona in 1841, and Pius IX went to Gaeta in 1848.]

Returning to Rome after a fruitless journey, Innocent applied himself to consoling and encouraging the Romans, restoring the churches, and ornamenting them anew with precious jewels of gold and silver. He at the same time busied himself in publishing constitutions for the discipline of the Church, in destroying so far as he could in their beginning the heresies of Pelagius, an English monk, and his disciple Celestius, whose nativity is unknown, and in condemning the reviving heresies of the Donatists.

Saint Jerome calls Innocent the successor and the son of Anastasius, because the former, like the latter, had given proofs of his love of justice by protecting the cause of Saint John Chrysostom, unworthily deposed from the see of Constantinople, and driven from his church by the faction of Theophilus. (It must not be forgotten that Saint John Chrysostom appealed from the sentence of the Conciliabule du Chêne, that the pontiff reversed the iniquitous condemnation, and that his sentence was respected by the whole Church. The Conciliabule du Chêne was so called because held in the church of a quarter of the town of Chalcedon to which a great oak had given its name.) He who had condemned the two councils irregularly held against a bishop, whom no prudent man could deem guilty, could not but be inflexible against the Novatians, who, for more than a century, had kept up their schism.

Innocent, of his own sense of duty, determined to anathematize both Pelagius and Celestius, who continued to torment men's consciences by their audacious doctrines on original sin, free will, and divine grace.

Saint Innocent ordered that all important causes, after the sentence of the bishop, should be remitted to the Holy See, "according to the religious custom", as he himself said. With the legacy of the matron Vestina, he built and erected into a cardinalate parish the Church of Saints Vitalius, Gervasius, and Protasius.

In four ordinations, in the month of December, this pope created fifty-four bishops, thirty priests, and fifteen deacons. He governed the Church fifteen years, two months, and ten days.

He was endowed with very distinguished intellect and singular prudence. He laid it down that a ruler should never dismiss the ministers of his predecessor, "for", said he, "new comers injure business before they learn how to do it".

He died on the 28th of July, in the year 417, and was buried in the cemetery at the Orso Pileato, and thence his body was removed to the Church of Saint Sylvester and Saint Martin a' i Monti.

The Holy See remained vacant twenty-one days.

It was under the reign of Innocent I that Eutropius suffered martyrdom at Constantinople. The prefect, a pagan, and the enemy of the Christians, inflicted the most cruel tortures on the friends of Saint Chrysostom. Eutropius, reader and chanter, was put to the question. Fire was applied to him; he was beaten with straps of raw hides, and with sticks; his sides, his cheeks, and his forehead were torn with iron hooks, and, finally, lighted torches were plunged into the gaping wounds where the flesh had been torn completely away from the bone, and he expired.

The priest, Tigrius, was also stripped, scourged upon the back, and tied hand and foot, and stretched so violently that the joints were dislocated.

In France the barbarians furiously tortured the bishops; at Rheims, Saint Nicasia, with the virgin Eutropia, her sister; at Arras, Saint Diogene; at Auxerre, Saint Paterna; at Langres, Saint Didier. Everywhere the same deplorable horrors followed the triumph of the barbarians. It seemed as though Constantine had everywhere propagated Catholicism only that the victims might be the more plainly pointed out for destruction; and among those barbarians who thus tortured and destroyed Christians, there were some who pretended to believe in Christ.

 

San Martino ai Monti