Pope Paschal

Pope Paschal I was a native of Rome and the son of a man named Bonosus. Neither a baptismal name distinct from his papal name nor a verifiable year of birth survives in the sources. Before his election he belonged to the Roman clergy and was priest of the titular church of Santa Susanna. He was chosen bishop of Rome in late January 817, immediately after the death of Stephen IV, and was consecrated without waiting for prior confirmation from the Frankish court, though he thereafter obtained recognition from Emperor Louis the Pious. His short pontificate belongs to the early ninth century, when the Roman Church was bound to the Carolingian emperors yet anxious to keep control of its own elections and Italian patrimonies.

Paschal’s dealings with the Franks combined cooperation and friction. The Pactum Ludovicianum of 817 confirmed the territorial possessions and rights of the Roman Church. In 823 he crowned Lothair I, son of Louis the Pious, as co-emperor in Rome. Relations deteriorated after the violent deaths of two papal officials, the primicerius Theodore and the nomenclator Leo, who were regarded as imperial partisans; Paschal was obliged to clear himself by oath of having ordered the killings. In the same years he took a firm line against Byzantine Iconoclasm, corresponding with Theodore the Studite and giving refuge in Rome to Greek monks who had fled persecution in the East. These episodes place him at the intersection of Carolingian politics, Roman clerical independence, and the last great phase of the iconoclast controversy.

He is especially remembered as a restorer of Roman basilicas and a promoter of martyr cults. He rebuilt Santa Prassede and decorated it with mosaics that include his own portrait and that of his mother Theodora, who is styled episcopa. He reconstructed Santa Cecilia in Trastevere in connection with the recovery of relics identified as those of Saint Cecilia, and he restored Santa Maria in Domnica, likewise given a mosaic image of the pope. Relics were translated from the catacombs into these urban churches, concentrating the cult of the early martyrs inside the city. The surviving mosaics are among the principal monuments of early ninth-century Roman art.

Paschal I died in Rome in 824, on 11 February according to the date later kept as his feast, and was succeeded by Eugene II. He has been venerated as a saint in the Roman Church; the cult is of early date and does not rest on a formal canonization of the later medieval type. His feast stands on 11 February in the Roman Martyrology, although it was dropped from the General Roman Calendar in 1969. Ancient and modern notices of his burial are not fully consistent, some associating him with St. Peter’s Basilica and others with Santa Prassede, which he had restored.