THE LIVES AND TIMES OF THE POPES IN THE FIFTH CENTURY

 

SAINT HILARY

A.D. 461-467

 

HILARY of Cagliari, in Sardinia, son of Crispin, a cardinal-deacon, created by Saint Zosimus, and Leo's legate to the Council of Chalcedon, was elected pontiff on the 12th, and consecrated on the 17th of November, A.D. 461.

In the year 463 he ordered Victor of Aquitaine, a celebrated mathematician of that time, to compose a paschal canon, so as, if possible, positively to settle the difference of opinion between the East and the West as to the celebration of Easter.

In the Roman council held on the anniversary of his consecration, the 17th day of November, 465, among other decrees of ecclesiastical discipline he gave one which specified that no cleric should be ordained who had not cultivated rhetoric; that no bishop should be consecrated without the consent of his metropolitan; and, finally, that no bishop elect should thereupon choose his successor, as had been the practice of some bishops. The first Council of Nice had already decreed this last prohibition.

This pope confirmed the general councils of Nice, of Ephesus, and of Chalcedon, and the celebrated letter of Saint Leo to Saint Flavian, called by Saint Gregory a volume and a definition that letter in which the whole controversy on the mystery of the Incarnation is examined and defined. The errors of Nestorius and Eutychius are condemned, and the Catholic doctrine lucidly displayed.

He ordered that the bishops should hold councils yearly; the Council of Nice had proposed that it should be so every other year. He excommunicated anew Nestorius, Eutychius, and their abettors. He also ordered the establishment of libraries in the Basilica of the Lateran.

Saint Hilary so courageously resisted the Emperor Athemius, who had brought Macedonian heretics to Rome, that the emperor, overcome by the Holy Father, promised that he would no longer protect them.

Bury, in his Notitia, says of Pope Saint Hilary: "by his contempt of riches and the greatness of his enterprises, shines among the most sublime pontiffs".

In one December ordination he created twenty-two bishops, twenty-five priests, and six deacons; or, as others say, eighty-six bishops, fifty-eight priests, and eleven deacons, in three ordinations. He governed the Church nearly six years, and died on the 10th of September, A.D. 467.

Saint Hilary displayed great magnificence in the churches. He was interred near Sixtus III, in the catacombs of Saint Laurence beyond the walls. The Holy See remained vacant nine days. Under the reign of Hilary died Saint Simon Stylites. Simon felt annoyed by the innumerable crowds that pressed around him to touch the skins in which he was clad, and thus obtain a benediction from them. He disliked both the excessive honors themselves and the continual pressure of the crowds; and it was thence that he was induced to isolate himself permanently upon a pillar, which he caused to be erected, first six feet in height, then twelve, and finally thirty-six. Many censured so extraordinary a way of living, and some have ridiculed it; but Theodoret believed that it was the effect of a special providence of God, that such a spectacle might strike mankind; and the miracles worked by Simon, both before and after, furnish great reason for this belief.

 

SAINT SIMPLICIUS A.D. 467-483

 

SAINT SIMPLICIUS was a native of Tivoli, a town in the Papal States, near Rome, and was the son of Castinus. He was created pontiff on the 2oth of September, 467. With the same hereditary constancy which had been displayed by his predecessors Leo and Hilary, he resisted all the importunities of the Emperor Leo. That prince, urged by Acacius, Bishop of Constantinople, solicited the Holy Father to approve the twenty-eighth canon of the Council of Chalcedon, in which it was attempted to grant the first see to Constantinople, after that of Rome; which canon had been annulled by Leo. He also refused to restore Peter Mongus to the see of Alexandria, and Peter the Tanner to the see of Antioch. He ordered that the alms of the faithful should be divided into four parts: the first for the bishops, the second for the clergy, and the two other parts for the maintenance of the Church, for pilgrims, and for the resident poor; which subsequently was in more positive manner confirmed by Saint Gelasius I, Saint Gregory the Great, other pontiffs, and various councils.

It was an established rule, from the time of Saint Peter, that the pontiffs should always confer orders in the month of December; Simplicius was the first to confer them in the month of February; and so, after him, until the ninth century, all the popes conferred orders either in the month of December, or in the first week of Lent, or after the fourth Sunday in Lent, with the exception of Leo II, who administered that sacrament in the months of May and June, and Saint Gregory the Great once in September. No pope, however, conferred orders on the Saturday before Easter.

In 482 the Holy Father named the Bishop of Seville as first bishop in Spain. It was a prerogative purely personal, which consisted in a power granted by the pope confiding to that bishop the care of seeing to the observance of the canons. That primacy of the Church of Seville continued till the celebration of the Council of Toledo, which took place in 681. In that space of time, from 482 to 681, the Bishop of Seville was not alone in the enjoyment of that pre-eminence of vicar or legate of the pope; for Pope Hormisdas, in 517, gave nearly like power to John, Bishop of Tarragona.

In three ordinations, in the month of December and in the month of February, Simplicius created thirty-six bishops, fifty-eight priests, and eleven deacons. He governed the Church more than fifteen years, and died on the 1st of March, 483, after having seen the extinction, in 476, of the Roman Empire of the West, in the person of Augustulus, subjected by Odoacer, king of the Heruli. About that time Zeno reigned in the East, and followed the errors of Eutychius. In the West, in Italy, reigned Odoacer, an Arian; in Gaul, the Burgundians, also Arians; further, the Goths were Arians; the Franks pagans. In Spain the Goths and the Suevi favored the doctrine of Arius; in Great Britain the Saxons remained pagan, and in Africa the Vandals showed themselves obstinate Arians. What was the situation of the Christian republic at that time will readily-be imagined, and also what courage and what talents were required in its chief to enable him to defend and propagate the dogmas and his authority.

Saint Simplicius was interred in the Vatican Basilica. The Holy See remained vacant seven days.

 

SAINT FELIX III A.D. 483-492

 

SAINT FELIX III, Roman, son of Felix, cardinal-priest of the Church of Saints Nereus and Achilles, belonged to the Anicia family, the wealthiest, noblest, and most powerful in Rome. Felix was elected pope on the 8th of March, 483. It was evident in the very beginning of his reign that he would not degenerate from his predecessors, and would neither admit nor tolerate, in matters of faith, any equivocation or ambiguity of phrase. He declared that he would prefer the safety of dogma to all human respect, to all earthly prudence, and that he would always maintain open war with the contumacious, rather than an insidious and suspicious peace. He condemned, the following year (484), and repulsed from the episcopate and the Catholic communion, Acacius, Patriarch of Constantinople, author of the first schism between the Greek and the Latin Church, which lasted thirty-five years, down to Pope Hormisdas, who was elected in 514. Acacius was also an indefatigable abettor of Peter Mongus, Bishop of Alexandria, and of Peter the Tanner, or Gnaffeo, pseudo-Bishop of Antioch, both condemned as Eutychian heretics. The same penalty was fulminated by the pope against Vital, Bishop of Yrento, a city of Picenum, now reduced to a small number of houses; and against Missenus, Bishop of Cumea, because, having been sent as legates to Constantinople about the affairs of the East, they had allowed themselves to be intimidated by the threats of Zeno and Acacius, and had betrayed the ministry with which they were intrusted. Felix improved the Henotic, that is to say, the Edict of Pacification, the apparent object of which was to establish unity, but which really concealed a snare set by the ministers of the Emperor Zeno. The Catholics and the Eutychians were to be reconciled. Acacius, by the vilest flatteries, endeavored to persuade the emperor that he could decide questions of the faith. To that end the prince issued this edict, called Unitive, or Uniting. The intention seemed upright, and the decree seemed to contain nothing but what was openly Catholic. But Felix was endowed with a rare perception; he noticed that in the Henotic there were omissions which might, to less attentive minds, appear to be innocent. But the sagacity of the pontiff at once perceived that they were suspicious, if not actually malicious, tending only to bring about an apparent political accommodation, while really confounding together the faithful with the false believers.

It must not be omitted to state how Acacius learned that he was excommunicated by Felix. It was necessary that the anathema should be published in Constantinople itself, amidst the glory and power of Acacius. One Sunday, as he was solemnly proceeding to church, some monks from Rome fastened to his robe the excommunication sent by Felix. The courageous monks paid for their boldness with their lives; they were put to death on the spot.

Felix did not confine himself to bestowing tender and benevolent care upon the interests of the Church of Constantinople; he did not lose sight of the African Church. He wrote to the emperor to interpose with Huneric, king of the Vandals, to engage him to exercise no cruelties on the African bishops. He was the first pontiff who gave the emperor the name of Son. One of his letters to Zeno commences thus: "Gloriosissimo et serenissimo Filio Zenoni Augusto, Felix, Episcopus in Domino, salutem". This example was followed by Pope Anastasius II when writing to the Emperor Anastasius. In two ordinations the Holy Father created thirty-one bishops, twenty-eight priests, and five deacons. He governed the Church eight years, eleven months, and seventeen days. The Holy See was vacant four days.

 

SAINT GELASIUS I A.D. 492-496

 

GELASIUS,Roman, as he himself affirmed, and not African, was the son of Valerius, and was created pope on the 2d of March, 492. According to some writers he instituted the regular canons of Lateran. Gelasius declared, in a council of sixty bishops held at Rome in 494, what were the sacred books in both the Old Testament and the New; what books were received by the Church; and, finally, what were the apocryphal books. He commanded, in the same council, that the four general councils, that of Nice, that of Constantinople, that of Ephesus, and that of Chalcedon, should be respected. He suppressed the Lupercal feasts, and caused them to disappear from Rome; those feasts in which naked men ran about the city, striking with goat-skin scourges all barren women. The Holy Father refuted, in a treatise, the senator Andromachus, who complained of the abolition of the Lupercalia. Instead of the famous Lupercalia, Gelasius instituted the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin. Martinus maintains that it was long before celebrated in the East; however, we know that the pontiff Sergius, in the seventh century, added to it the procession with lighted tapers.

Saint Gelasius refused to grant the communion and the pacific letters to Euphemius, Bishop of Constantinople, until he had erased the name of Acacius from the sacred diptychs. The same pope also combated the remains of the Pelagian heresy which endeavored to steal into Dalmatia and Picenum, imitating herein his predecessors, Saint Innocent I, Saint Zosimus, Saint Boniface I, Saint Celestine I, Saint Sixtus III, and Saint Leo the Great, who never allowed any advance to the followers of that heresy. The more certainly to recognize Manichaeans remaining in Rome, who abhorred wine, which they called "the gall of the prince of darkness and of the devil", Gelasius ordered that the faithful should communicate in both kinds; and this continued up to the twelfth century. It was entirely and formally abolished in 1416, by the Council of Constance. However, according to the Council of Trent, this prerogative was granted to the kings of France on the day of their coronation, to the deacons and subdeacons of Saint Denis, near Paris, for Sundays and solemn days, and, finally, to the ministers of the altars of the monastery of Cluny in France, for feast-days. Saint Gelasius published a code or missal for the right ordering of the Masses.

Gelasius was the first to allow the conferring of orders in all the ember days of the year. In two ordinations he created seventy-seven bishops, thirty-two priests, and twelve deacons; he governed the Church four years, eight months, and nineteen days. He died on the 21st of November, and was interred at the Vatican, the same year in which Clovis in France embraced the Catholic religion. This pope took part in that immense success of Catholicity. The Holy See was vacant six days. Gelasius was a model of purity, of zeal, and of simplicity in his conduct. His morals corresponded with his conduct. It will have been noticed in the life of Saint Hilary that Saint Hilary confirmed the general councils of Nice, Ephesus, and Chalcedon, and that in that confirmation nothing is said about that of Constantinople. It is clear that Gelasius was more explicit.

 

SAINT ANASTASIUS II A.D. 496-498

 

ANASTASIUS II was a Roman, and born in the Nicolo Capotoro, on the Esquiline. He was created pontiff on the 28th of November, 496. Being consulted as to the baptisms given during the life of Acacius, the pope replied that the baptism and the orders conferred by an ex-communicated and suspended bishop were valid nevertheless. He congratulated Clovis, King of France, on being baptized, and on having set that heroic example in presence
of a great number of Frank warriors, at the solicitation of his wife, Clotilda.

The author of the Liber Pontificalis relates that many priests and clerics withdrew from the communion of Anastasius II, on account of his close relations with Photinus, deacon of Thessalonica, who had adhered to the party of Acacius, and because in this reign it had been thought proper to recall that same Acacius. Here, however, we must note an important truth upon that subject. The Holy Father could scarcely have conceived the idea of restoring the see of which that heretic had been deprived, inasmuch as that heretic died in 488, and under the reign of the predecessor of Anastasius, Felix III. The falsehood of the report surely requires no further comment. It has also been said that Acacius could not be reinstated by Pope Anastasius, be cause, before that pontiff could succeed in his design, he was killed by lightning. This was a mere calumny circulated by the partisans of the antipope Laurentius. The Anastasius who was struck dead in a thunder-storm was the Emperor Anastasius, and not the pope of the same name, as Baronius affirms in An. 497. In an ordination, in the month of December, the Holy Father created sixteen bishops and twelve priests. He governed the Church two years, all but six days. He died on the 16th of November, 498, and was buried in the porch of Saint Peter s. The Holy See remained vacant six days.

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