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Vigilius, bishop of Rome from 537 until 555, was born in Rome to a distinguished aristocratic family. His father Johannes is recorded as having held consular rank, and his brother Reparatus was a senator who later served as prefect of Rome and was killed after Totila took the city during the Gothic War. Vigilius entered the Roman clergy and became a deacon. Under Pope Boniface II an attempt was made to designate him as successor, but the arrangement was withdrawn in the face of opposition. In the 530s he was in Constantinople, where Empress Theodora took an interest in him, hoping that a pope aligned with the court might restore the deposed Miaphysite patriarch Anthimus and soften Roman policy toward the anti-Chalcedonian churches of the East.

His accession was inseparable from Byzantine intervention in Italy and the removal of his predecessor Silverius. After Belisarius occupied Rome, Silverius was accused of dealing with the Goths, deposed, and exiled; Vigilius was then elected and consecrated in March 537. Ancient accounts disagree on how far he personally engineered Silverius’s fall, but imperial pressure and Theodora’s support were decisive. Silverius died in exile on Palmaria, after which Vigilius was generally recognized in the West. The early years of his pontificate unfolded amid the Gothic War, including prolonged sieges of Rome that left the city, its churches, and its clergy in extreme hardship.

The central episode of the reign was the Three Chapters controversy. Justinian I, seeking to conciliate Miaphysite Christians, demanded condemnation of Theodore of Mopsuestia, certain writings of Theodoret of Cyrrhus, and the letter of Ibas of Edessa to Mari—texts associated with the Antiochene tradition and, in Western eyes, with the Council of Chalcedon. In 545 Vigilius was taken from Rome by imperial officers, delayed in Sicily, and brought to Constantinople, where he arrived in 547. Under heavy pressure he issued in 548 a Judicatum condemning the Three Chapters, which provoked schism with many African, Illyrian, and even Roman clergy. He later withdrew that document. He refused at first to take part in the council Justinian convened in 553 (the Second Council of Constantinople), suffered harsh treatment, and issued a Constitutum that stopped short of the emperor’s demands. After the council condemned the Three Chapters he eventually confirmed its decrees, a submission that deepened the so-called Schism of the Three Chapters in parts of Italy and the West.

Allowed at last to leave the capital, Vigilius died at Syracuse in Sicily in 555 while returning to Rome, and never again entered the city as pope. His body was brought to Rome and buried at the church of San Marcello on the Via Salaria. Later Latin tradition did not number him among the sainted popes. His pontificate is remembered for the collision between Justinian’s religious policy and Western attachment to Chalcedon, and for the jurisdictional and theological strains that followed in Italy and beyond.

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