Pope Felix

The name Pope Felix does not denote a single historical person. It belongs to several bishops of Rome in late antiquity and to one fifteenth-century antipope, and the resulting overlap of names has long confused papal catalogues, martyrologies, and popular hagiography. Early lists such as the Liber Pontificalis sometimes treated disputed claimants as legitimate popes and sometimes as schismatics, so the ordinal numbers attached to Felix are not stable across sources. In the numbering now usual in Catholic reference works, Felix I, Felix III, and Felix IV are counted as legitimate popes of Rome; Felix II is treated as a mid-fourth-century antipope; and Felix V is the last widely recognized antipope. Birth years are not recorded for the late-antique popes of this name. Later compilers occasionally used an accession year as if it were a birth year; that substitution is not historically warranted and is not followed here.

Felix I headed the Roman church in the later third century, succeeding Dionysius and dying in 274 during the reign of the emperor Aurelian. Almost no contemporary documentation of his acts survives. The Liber Pontificalis later credited him with directing that Mass be celebrated over the memorials of martyrs, but modern historians regard this as an etiological legend rather than a securely attested decree. Claims that he himself died a martyr are likewise doubtful, though his name entered early martyrological tradition and a feast was kept on 30 May, with burial traditionally placed in the Catacomb of Callixtus on the Via Appia. Nothing reliable is known of his family or of a birthplace beyond the ordinary presumption that third-century Roman bishops were closely tied to the city of Rome.

The next figures named Felix are entangled with the case of Felix II, a Roman archdeacon whom the emperor Constantius II installed in 355 after Pope Liberius was sent into exile. When Liberius returned, Felix was expelled; he died in 365. Later Roman memory sometimes counted him as a pope and sometimes as an antipope, which shifted the ordinals of those who followed. The man now generally called Felix III died in 492. The Liber Pontificalis describes him as a Roman, son of a priest named Felix, and of senatorial background. Elected in 483, he is remembered above all for the Acacian schism: he excommunicated Patriarch Acacius of Constantinople over the Henotikon of the emperor Zeno, opening a breach between Rome and the East that lasted until 519. A later genealogical tradition, not independently verified at every link, made him an ancestor of Pope Gregory the Great. A feast has been observed on 1 March. Felix IV, who died in 530, obtained the papacy with the backing of the Ostrogothic court of Theodoric. He is associated with the establishment of the basilica of Saints Cosmas and Damian in the Roman Forum and with an attempt to designate Boniface II as his successor, an act that caused controversy. A feast has been kept on 30 January.

The last papal use of the name belongs to Amadeus VIII, Duke of Savoy, elected at the Council of Basel in 1439 and styled Felix V. He had already withdrawn from ducal government into a religious life at Ripaille. His claim was not accepted by the line of popes recognized at Rome; he resigned in 1449 and died in 1451. Because these men lived in different centuries, stood in different relations to imperial and royal power, and left unequal records, no single birthplace, death date, burial site, feast day, or list of patronages can be assigned to “Pope Felix” as though he were one person. Notices that collapse the several Felixes into a single saint, or that invent unattested birth years, should be treated with caution.