Boniface I

Boniface I was a Roman by birth, described in the Liber Pontificalis as natione Romanus and as the son of a priest named Jocundus (Iocundus). The year of his birth is not recorded in any surviving reliable source. He served as a priest of the Church of Rome and appears in the historical record principally at the moment of his election. Later tradition remembered him as already elderly and of a peaceable disposition. His father’s status as a priest reflects the still-common practice in the fourth and early fifth centuries whereby married men, once ordained, remained in clerical service; nothing certain is known of Boniface’s own household.

The death of Pope Zosimus on 26 December 418 produced a double election that briefly divided the Roman Church and drew in the imperial government. On 27 December a faction led by deacons chose the archdeacon Eulalius and had him consecrated in the Lateran basilica. On 28 December the greater part of the priests elected Boniface and consecrated him in the church of Saint Marcellus on the Via Lata. Both parties appealed to Emperor Honorius at Ravenna. Honorius at first recognized Eulalius. Street violence in Rome and competing claims to the basilicas prompted the emperor to call a synod of Italian bishops and to command both Boniface and Eulalius to leave Rome until the dispute was settled. A further council was planned at Spoleto. When Easter 419 approached, Eulalius returned to the city against the imperial order and attempted to occupy the Lateran; Boniface remained outside Rome in obedience to the emperor. Honorius thereupon declared Boniface the legitimate bishop of Rome in April 419 and had Eulalius expelled. The defeated claimant was later assigned, according to some reports, to a lesser see such as Nepi, though the details of his later life are poorly attested.

Boniface’s pontificate, which lasted from late 418 until 422, was occupied with questions of jurisdiction and doctrine that had already agitated the reigns of Innocent I and Zosimus. In the prefecture of Illyricum he insisted that the churches of Eastern Illyricum remained subject to Rome through the bishop of Thessalonica, who acted as papal vicar. A constitution of the Eastern emperor Theodosius II, issued in 421, sought to attach those churches to the see of Constantinople; Boniface obtained from Honorius a contrary assertion of Roman rights, and the papal vicariate at Thessalonica continued. He upheld the condemnation of Pelagius and Caelestius. The African episcopate, led by figures such as Augustine of Hippo and Aurelius of Carthage, found in him a firm ally; Augustine dedicated to Boniface the treatise Contra duas epistulas Pelagianorum, written in response to Pelagian arguments that had been circulated in Italy. In southern Gaul, Boniface scaled back the exceptional privileges that Zosimus had conferred on Patroclus, bishop of Arles, privileges that had offended other Gallic metropolitans. Boniface received appeals and sought to restore the older metropolitan arrangement without entirely dismantling Arles’s regional role.

In Rome he was a builder and a promoter of the cult of the martyrs. He erected an oratory on the Via Salaria over the cemetery associated with Saint Felicitas of Rome and embellished the tomb of Felicitas and the memorials of her seven sons, who were venerated as martyrs. He died in Rome on 4 September 422 and was buried in the cemetery of Saint Felicitas, also identified with the Catacomb or Cemetery of Maximus, on the Via Salaria, in the tomb area he had prepared. Celestine I succeeded him. The Church of Rome numbered him among the saints. His feast was long kept on 25 October; the modern Roman Martyrology also records him on 4 September, the day of his death. He should not be confused with the eighth-century missionary Saint Boniface of Mainz, nor with later popes of the same name.