Saint Hormisdas

Saint Hormisdas was bishop of Rome from 514 to 523. He went down in history as the pope who ended the thirty-five-year rift between Rome and Constantinople. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on August 6 as the pope who restored peace in the Church.

He came from Frosinone, southeast of Rome, and his father’s name was Justus. The year of his birth is unknown. Before receiving higher orders he had been married. His son was Silverius, who himself became pope in 536 and is venerated as a saint and martyr. Under the pontificate of Symmachus, Hormisdas was a deacon of the Roman Church and was among the pope’s most loyal collaborators during the conflict with the antipope Laurentius.

He was elected to succeed Symmachus on July 20, 514. First he received back into unity the last followers of Laurentius. His chief concern, however, was unity with the East. Since 484 Rome and Constantinople had been divided by a rift named the Acacian schism after Patriarch Acacius. It had grown out of the Henoticon of Emperor Zeno, a document that, to reconcile the Monophysites, passed over the teaching of the Council of Chalcedon.

Emperor Anastasius I, who favored the Monophysites, opened talks with the pope but had no intention of yielding. Two embassies sent by Hormisdas, in 515 and 517, came back empty-handed. With the first of them the pope sent to the East a profession of faith, known today as the Formula of Hormisdas, which bishops who wanted unity with Rome were to sign. It condemned Acacius and the earlier heretics, quoted the words of Christ, “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church,” and declared that in the Apostolic See the Catholic religion has always been preserved without stain.

The turning point came in 518, when the orthodox Justin I became emperor. Hormisdas sent a new embassy to Constantinople with the same profession of faith. Patriarch John accepted the pope’s formula on March 28, 519, and the names of Acacius and of the emperors Zeno and Anastasius were struck from the diptychs, the lists of names commemorated in the liturgy. Further bishops of the East then signed the formula, though not all of them. Its words, repeated by the Fourth Council of Constantinople, were quoted in 1870 by the First Vatican Council in the constitution Pastor aeternus.

Hormisdas also wrote to the bishops of Spain and Gaul, and the Martyrology recalls that he worked to ensure that the new peoples of the West respected the rights of the Church. At his request Dionysius Exiguus collected the canons of the Greek synods together with a Latin translation. Toward the end of his life he received the news that after the death of the Vandal king Thrasamund the persecution of Catholics in Africa had ceased.

He died in Rome on August 6, 523, after nine years as pope, and was buried in Saint Peter’s Basilica. He has been venerated as a saint for many centuries, long before canonization processes existed.