Innocent I of Rome

Saint Innocent I of Rome was bishop of Rome from 401 or 402 until 417. The Orthodox Church remembers him above all because he took the side of Saint John Chrysostom, driven out of the see of Constantinople.

According to the Book of the Popes he was born at Albano near Rome, the son of a man named Innocent. Saint Jerome, however, calls him the son of his predecessor Anastasius, which some historians understand as a spiritual rather than a bodily kinship. From the beginning of his ministry he was regarded as an arbiter in Church disputes in both East and West. His letters to Victricius of Rouen, Exsuperius of Toulouse and Alexander of Antioch show his care for good order in the Church. In 405 he sent Exsuperius a list of the books of Holy Scripture.

When John Chrysostom appealed to him against Theophilus of Alexandria, Innocent took the part of the exiled bishop. The sources consulted give no details of the steps he took, so we say only that the bishop of Rome stayed on John's side.

In 410, when Rome was sacked by the Goths of Alaric, Innocent was at the head of its Church. Against the heresy of Pelagius, who denied the need for divine grace, he confirmed the decisions of the African synods of Carthage (416) and Mileve, after five African bishops, among them Blessed Augustine, had written to him to explain their position.

He reposed in the Lord on 12 March 417. In 846, with the approval of Pope Sergius II, his relics, together with those of his father Anastasius, were moved to Gandersheim in Saxony, where most of them lie to this day. The English Orthodox calendar remembers him on 28 July, a day on which he was also kept in the West from the thirteenth to the twentieth century; today the Church of Rome commemorates him on 12 March. He is a saint of the undivided Church.