Gelasius I

Pope Gelasius I was bishop of Rome from 1 March 492 to 21 November 496, a prolific Church writer and a defender of the faith of Chalcedon. He is honoured as a saint of the undivided Church and commemorated on 21 November in the Western calendar and in English-⁠language Orthodox calendars.

According to the Book of the Popes (Liber Pontificalis) he was of African descent; in a letter to Emperor Anastasius he says he was born a Roman, which may only mean that he came from Roman Africa before the Vandal invasion. He is thought to have worked beside his predecessor Felix III on the drafting of papal documents.

His ministry fell during the Acacian schism between Rome and Constantinople. Gelasius insisted that the name of the late Patriarch Acacius be struck from the diptychs, despite conciliatory gestures from Patriarch Euphemius, and so deepened the rift with the East. He wrote On the Two Natures in Christ against the Monophysites, and he asserted strongly the primacy of the see of Rome over the whole Church, a teaching the East does not accept. In 494 he sent Emperor Anastasius the letter Duo sunt, on the relation between the authority of the Church and that of the state. With the Ostrogothic king Theodoric, though an Arian, he kept good relations.

At home he finally suppressed the pagan festival of the Lupercalia after a long contest. More than a hundred of his letters and six treatises survive. The list of books received and rejected, the Decretum Gelasianum, is attributed to him, but internal evidence shows it to be later; the Gelasian Sacramentary likewise took its present form later, in Gaul, and is not his work. He reposed on 21 November 496.