Confessor Pope Sergius

Sergius I, remembered in both Latin and Greek Christian tradition as a pope and confessor, was a Sicilian of Syrian ancestry, born in Palermo to a father named Tiberius who came from the region of Antioch. The precise year of his birth is not recorded. He belonged to the later seventh century, when Sicily was a Byzantine province and Rome still lay within the political orbit of Constantinople, even as the bishops of Rome exercised growing practical independence. Sergius came to Rome as a young man, received his clerical formation there among the Roman clergy rather than in a monastic order, and was ordained priest of the titular church of Saint Susanna by Pope Leo II in the early 680s. The Liber Pontificalis, the principal narrative source for his life, presents him as a product of that urban Roman clergy.

After the death of Pope Conon in 687 the Roman see was contested by two rival candidates, the archpriest Theodore and the archdeacon Paschal. Paschal is said to have tried to secure the support of the exarch of Ravenna by a large payment. In the resulting deadlock the majority of the clergy and people turned to Sergius, who was elected and consecrated on 15 December 687. Paschal’s pretensions collapsed; he was later confined to a monastery, accused of consulting diviners, and died in confinement. Sergius thus entered office after a typical late-antique disputed election, but with the eventual consensus of the Roman church.

The defining political-religious episode of his pontificate was his refusal to endorse the canons of the Quinisext Council, or Council in Trullo, summoned by Emperor Justinian II at Constantinople in 692. That assembly intended to supply disciplinary canons for the Fifth and Sixth Ecumenical Councils. Several of its decrees—on clerical marriage, on the ranking of the see of Constantinople, and on certain Roman liturgical and fasting customs—were unacceptable in Rome. When the emperor demanded the pope’s signature, Sergius declined. Justinian II then ordered that the pope be arrested and brought to Constantinople, repeating the fate of Martin I a generation earlier. The imperial agent, the protospatharios Zacharias, found himself opposed by the militias of Rome, Ravenna, and the Pentapolis; he was forced to take refuge from the crowd, and Sergius himself intervened to spare his life. The emperor was overthrown in 695 before the confrontation could be renewed, and although Justinian later recovered the throne he did not again attempt to coerce Sergius.

Apart from this conflict, Sergius left a marked liturgical and pastoral imprint. He introduced the chanting of the Agnus Dei at the fraction of the bread in the Roman Mass. He established stational processions in Rome for the feasts of the Annunciation, the Nativity of Mary, the Dormition (Assumption), and the Presentation of the Lord. He took a particular interest in the young English church: in 689 he baptized Caedwalla, the visiting king of Wessex, who died in Rome shortly afterward and was buried at St. Peter’s; in 695 he consecrated the Northumbrian missionary Willibrord as archbishop for the Frisian mission and conferred the pallium on him. He restored and decorated Roman churches, including work at St. Peter’s, where a silver reliquary containing a relic of the True Cross was found in a sacristy during his time and exposed for veneration.

Sergius died in Rome on 8 September 701 and was buried in the Constantinian basilica of St. Peter. Both the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church honor him as a saint; his feast is kept on 8 September, and on some Orthodox calendars on 9 September. Because he endured imperial pressure in defense of Roman ecclesiastical custom without undergoing martyrdom, later tradition styles him a confessor. No formal act of canonization in the later medieval or modern sense is recorded; his cult rests on ancient liturgical veneration.