BONIFACE V.

AD. 619-625.

 

EMPEROR. HERACLIUS  (610-641)

KING. ADAWALD ( 615-624) .

Exarchs.  Eleutherius, 616-620 or Eusebius (?) 620-625.

                                                       

This Pope, who was possibly one of the many clerics of his name who were employed by Gregory the Great, and who is described as ‘the mildest of men’, was consecrated (December 23, 619) after the See had been vacant for more than a year. He was a Neapolitan, and the son of the omnipresent John.

As was stated under the life of Deusdedit, Eleutherius the exarch rebelled against Heraclius. This took place some time in the year 619, and before the consecration of Boniface. At peace with the Lombards, and hoping to succeed where John of Compsa had failed, he assumed the Imperial purple. Acting on the advice of John, Archbishop of Ravenna, he set out for Rome to take the imperial crown,  “there, where the seat of empire had its permanent place”. This dictum of the archbishop shows, at least, what was the view of patriotic Italians on the transference of the seat of empire from Rome to Constantinople.

Eleutherius evidently overestimated the strength of his popularity, for he was slain by his own troops at Castrum Luciolis (Ponte Riccioli, near Cantiano), a fort on the Flaminian Way. His head was sent “to the most pious emperor at Constantinople”. His death must have been a great relief to Boniface. He would doubtless have been called upon to crown the usurper had he reached Rome; and he would then have had to choose between an emperor at Constantinople and an intarta at his own door.

Like his predecessor, Boniface showed his practical love for the clergy by grants of money to them. His biographer assigns several decrees to him, which, from the brief way in which they are stated, are not very easy of comprehension. In connection with the right of asylum he forbade anyone to be dragged from a church. Acolytes were not to presume ‘levare’ (to expose? or translate?) the relics of the martyrs. This had to be done by priests only.

In his notes on this latter decree, Duchesne holds that “there is no question here of the translation of relics, properly so-called”. In the days of Boniface V, he says, the bodies of the saints of Rome still lay in their graves, in the churches or cemeteries. They were not then carried about in reliquaries. The earliest mention of a translation from the suburbs into one of the city churches occurs in the time of Pope Theodore in the case of that of SS. Primus and Felician. And in the seventh century, at least, such ceremonies were too rare to be made the object of a general regulation such as this. He believes, therefore, that it is a question of the objects which were placed on the tombs of the martyrs, and then taken away as relics. In entrusting the distribution of these pious souvenirs to the priests in charge of the religious services of the sanctuaries, the Pope doubtless had in view increasing their value in the eyes of the pilgrims.

But the translation and distribution of relics, properly so-called, was by no means so rare in the seventh century as the abbé seems to suppose. The letters of Gregory the Great very often speak of the sending to and fro from Rome of relics or cases containing relics of saints, and of their being carried to new churches and oratories to be therein reverently placed. His contemporary, John of Ravenna, is recorded to have translated relics; and his epitaph tells of his receiving relics from Gregory. It may, indeed, in the seventh century, have been the custom at Rome, when relics were given, not “to give any part of the body of the saint”; but it was a custom that was very often honored by its breach. That curious vice of the pious too, relic-stealing, was in vogue in the days of Gregory I. Now all this necessarily implies a considerable amount of translation of relics of one sort or another.  ‘Levare’, moreover, seems to have been the technical phrase to denote the taking about (translation) of relics. The decree, therefore, of Boniface may be taken to mean that acolytes were not to translate, or in any way to prepare, relics for distribution.

The acolytes of the days of Boniface V must have been a pushing body, for a second decree was necessary to restrain them. In the Lateran basilica, at any rate (in Lateranis), they were forbidden to take the place of the deacons in administering the sacrament of baptism. This had to be done by the subdeacons who were not attached to the regions, the so-called subdiaconi sequentes. However, it would seem, from the second part of the Ordo Romanus I, that even after the time of Boniface the acolytes, at least in some churches, occasionally administered the sacrament of baptism.

Finally, Boniface ordained that the laws of the empire on the subject of wills were to be obeyed, presumably, as Duchesne observes, by the ecclesiastical notaries. For the Pope would not legislate for the civil lawyers.

His intercourse with England comprises practically all that is known of this Pope’s relations with the church at large. Bede tells us that he wrote “encouraging letters” to Mellitus, the third Archbishop of Canterbury, and to Justus, Bishop of Rochester. And sorely were such letters needed. For after the first successes under St. Augustine and King Ethelbert, the inevitable reaction had come, and the companions of the saint had somewhat lost heart. On the death of Mellitus, the Pope sent the pallium to Justus, the successor of Mellitus, and gave him power to consecrate bishops as the need arose. In the letter conferring these privileges upon Justus, Boniface tells him that he has heard from Eadbald, the son and successor of Ethelbert, that it was the eloquence and learning of Justus that had fully reconverted him to the true faith. For, on the death of his father, Eadbald had returned to his gods. The Pope goes on to say that he takes this as an augury that the conversion of many will be brought about by Justus, and exhorts him to use the privileges of the pallium, etc., which he has given him, not in such a way as to bring upon himself condemnation on the great accounting day, but for the salvation of souls. This letter was written in 624.

In another letter, of the following year, after noting that Justus had stated in a letter to him that St. Gregory had established the metropolitan See in Canterbury for St. Augustine and his successors, Boniface forbids any Christian to contravene that arrangement at any time, and “by the authority of Blessed Peter, the prince of the apostles”, he himself renews the decree, making Canterbury, which is specially under the guardianship of the See of Rome, the metropolitan of all Britain.

Boniface V evidently shared the affectionate vigilance for this country of Gregory I and his namesake Boniface IV. We next find him endeavoring to help Paulinus in his work for the conversion of Northumbria, that Anglo-Saxon kingdom, which stretched from the Humber to the Firth of Forth. It is well known that Edwin, the powerful ruler of that kingdom, was induced to agree to examine into the claims of Christianity, in order to obtain the hand of the Christian princess Ethelberga of Kent. The Pope, therefore, wrote (625) a letter of some length to him, in which he exhorted him to give up the worship of gods, so helpless that they could not stir unless someone moved them, and embrace the worship of the one true and living God who made heaven and earth. As an earnest of his goodwill, he sent the king a little present of an embroidered tunic and a cloak. He wrote at the same time to Edwin’s Christian wife, bidding her, by prayer and every means in her power, never to cease striving to obtain for her husband the grace of faith which she herself possessed. He begged her, in conclusion, to keep him well informed of the progress that Christianity made, as he was most anxious to know all about it; and he sent her little presents that were sure to have been very acceptable to the lady, a “silver mirror” and an “inlaid ivory comb”. The conversion of Northumbria was the work of these servants of God—the Pope, the Queen, and the Bishop, each in their respective spheres. Should any apology be needed for the enumeration of such details, with regard to events in corners of England, the words of Malmesbury himself may be offered, who has preserved us some of these details. “What is sweeter than to tell of the lives of our ancestors, that you may know the deeds of those from whom you have received the begin­nings of faith and models of a good life?”

During the pontificate of this Pope, and his more immediate predecessors and successors, events of the very first importance in the world's history were taking place, in the East. In 615, under Chosroes II, the Persians, who had for a long time been giving great trouble to the Eastern Empire, had advanced so far beyond the Euphrates that they captured Jerusalem, whence, to the intense grief and shame of all Christians, they carried off the relic of the true Cross. Soon afterwards they made themselves masters of Egypt, the granary of the Empire. After a long period of willful, or perhaps, rather, enforced inaction or preparation, the Emperor Heraclius took the field against them. One glorious campaign followed another, and in 629 the relic of the Holy Cross was retaken by Heraclius and by him brought back to Jerusalem. Unfortunately, these wars weakened both empires and made them an easy prey to that fanatical impostor, Mahomet or Mohammed.

Born during the lifetime of Gregory the Great, the ambitious and lustful Mohammed, self-styled “prophet of God”, in the year 622 gave to the world a new era in a political as well as in a chronological sense. The year 622, the year of the Hegira, or flight of Mohammed from Mecca, is the epoch from which his followers reckon their dates; and it serves to mark the appearance of a new power in the history of mankind—a power which, acting on the doctrine that “there is but one God, and Mohammed is his prophet”, and that all have to confess that doctrine or be made to do so, had at its feet, in less than seventy years, most of the civilized world.

In the year 630, Mohammed issued from the deserts of his native Arabia and declared war against the Empire. And in the reign of his second successor, Omar (634-643), the three patriarchal cities of Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria were in the hands of the Moslem, who has retained his hold on them, in the main, ever since. In the same reign, too, the Saracen also broke up the empire of Persia, and in thirty years after Omar’s death had even besieged Constantinople, That city did not indeed come into the power of the Moslem for several centuries. But the fall of Carthage (698), twenty-five years after the first appearance of the Mohammedans before the walls of the imperial city, gave them the command of North Africa and a base of operations against Spain. This latter country was added to the empire of the Caliph in 711, and fortunately was, for over a century, the only considerable portion of Europe which suffered from the exterminating rule of the Crescent.

It would be most interesting to know the views of the popes of this period on these momentous events, and to be able to compare them with those of the popes of later times, who showed themselves such uncompromising and able opponents of the Saracen and the “unspeakable” Turk. But the scanty records of the seventh century have hardly preserved us bare outlines of the leading facts of that age, much less the ideas of the principal men in it. We can only conjecture the grief of the Roman pontiffs at the sight of the numerous defeats of the Christian armies, their indignation at the conduct of the Greek emperors issuing dogmatic decrees instead of fighting the Arabs, and that they displayed the same instinctive opposition to the Moslems as did their successors of the days of the Crusades, regarding them not merely as heretics but as enemies of true civilization.

The Catholic historian may well be excused in seeing the hand of God in the fact of three out of the four Oriental patriarchs becoming at this period subject to the Saracen. With an ambitious patriarch of Constantinople a mere puppet in the hands of emperors often worthless and tyrannical, and with the other three patriarchs of Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem also subject to their sway, one cannot help feeling that, short of this calamitous subjugation of Christian bishops to Moslem Caliphs, nothing could have checked the growing pretensions of the Byzantine emperors and patriarchs in the ecclesiastical and spiritual orders, or have prevented the bishop of Constantinople from becoming “Universal Patriarch”, in fact as well as in name. And while, moreover, temporal power also was, of course, at the same time lost to the Oriental patriarchs, it was largely increased to the bishops of Rome. In a word, as a direct result of the Moslem conquests, which can only be described as an “act of God”, the power and importance of the Oriental patriarchs has gone on decreasing from age to age since that period, till now their names are scarcely known; while, on the other hand, the authority and influence of the bishop of Rome has gone on increasing up to this very day, when some 1300 bishops and over 260,000,000 people look up to him as their spiritual Head and Father.

Though Boniface completed the cemetery of St. Nicomedes (the remains of which, with its small basilica, were discovered in 1864) on the Via Nomentana, not far from the present Porta Pia, he was not buried there, but, as usual, in St. Peter's (October 25, 625).

 

HONORIUS I.