Pope Leo II

Pope Leo II, a Sicilian and the son of a man named Paul, was Bishop of Rome from 17 August 682 until his death in 683. No reliable source records the year or precise place of his birth beyond Sicily, which in the seventh century formed part of the Byzantine Empire. He was elected after the death of Pope Agatho in January 681, but his episcopal consecration was postponed for well over a year while the Roman Church awaited imperial confirmation from Constantinople, a regular feature of the Byzantine Papacy. Emperor Constantine IV eventually gave that assent, and Leo was consecrated on 17 August 682. His pontificate lasted less than eleven months.

Near-contemporary notices, especially the Liber Pontificalis, present him as learned and eloquent and as fluent in both Greek and Latin, a useful combination when the papacy still dealt closely with the imperial court and the Eastern churches. He is also remembered as a skilled singer and as a pope who took care for the chant and liturgical music of the Roman Church; later writers sometimes associated him with the composition of sacred hymns, though such attributions cannot be verified in detail. Accounts of his character stress personal charity, especially toward the poor and toward pilgrims in Rome.

The principal business of his reign was the reception in the West of the Third Council of Constantinople (680–681), the Sixth Ecumenical Council, which had been held under Agatho and which defined two wills and two operations in Christ against Monothelitism. Leo had the conciliar acts translated from Greek into Latin and confirmed them for the Latin Church. In letters to the emperor and to other recipients he also treated the council’s naming of Pope Honorius I among those it condemned. Leo’s own language stressed that Honorius had failed to extinguish the heresy and had by negligence allowed it to spread, a wording later Catholic theologians have often distinguished from a charge that Honorius formally taught heresy. Leo further transmitted the Constantinopolitan decrees to the Visigothic Church in Spain, writing to King Erwig and to Spanish bishops so that the council might be received there.

He is credited with ordinary acts of Roman administration, including ordinations and the care of churches and relics in the city. After a short reign he died in Rome on 28 June 683 and was buried in St. Peter’s Basilica. He has been venerated as a saint in the Roman Church from an early date; there was no later formal process of canonization of the medieval type. His feast is associated with 28 June, the traditional date of his death, though in some later Roman calendars it was observed on 3 July so as not to conflict with the vigil of Saints Peter and Paul.