Boniface I Pope of Rome

The Disputed Election and the Schism of Eulalius

When Pope Zosimus died on 27 December 418, two rival elections followed almost at once. A group of clergy drawn principally from the deacons occupied the Lateran basilica and elected the archdeacon Eulalius, while on the following Saturday a majority of the priests of the Roman Church elected Boniface, a former councillor of Pope Innocent I. Both men were consecrated on 29 December, Boniface at the Church of Saint Marcellus in the Campus Martius, leaving the city with two claimants to its episcopal see.

The dispute was submitted to the emperor Honorius, who at first recognized Eulalius but, after petitions alleging irregularities in his election, suspended judgment and summoned both parties. When Eulalius disregarded an imperial order to stay out of Rome and entered the city around Easter of 419, he forfeited the emperor's support; the council that had been proposed to settle the question at Spoleto was canceled, and on 3 April 419 Honorius confirmed Boniface as pope. By later account the schism had lasted some fifteen weeks. To prevent its recurrence, Honorius is said to have enacted a rule that, where a papal election was contested, neither claimant should be recognized and a fresh election should be held.

Government of the Church

Boniface worked to restore the ordinary structure of ecclesiastical authority. He drew back the wide vicariate powers that had been granted to certain Western bishops, notably reducing the standing claimed for the see of Arles, and returned metropolitan rights to provincial sees such as Narbonne and Vienne. In the East he maintained the long-standing jurisdiction of Rome over the churches of Illyricum, exercised through the bishop of Thessalonica as papal vicar; he contested, without lasting success, the measure by which the emperor Theodosius II in 421 sought to transfer authority over that region to the patriarch of Constantinople.

He is also remembered as a firm supporter of Blessed Augustine of Hippo during the Pelagian controversy. Augustine dedicated to Boniface his treatise Against Two Letters of the Pelagians, a sign of the close cooperation between the bishop of Rome and the great teacher of North Africa in defending the doctrine of grace.

Death and Veneration

Boniface died on 4 September 422 and, by tradition, was buried in the cemetery of Maximus on the Via Salaria, near the tomb of the martyr Felicitas. He is numbered among the pre-schism Western saints venerated as Orthodox; among the Latin Saints of the Orthodox Patriarchate of Rome his commemoration is kept on 4 September, while Western usage observes him on 25 October. He was succeeded as bishop of Rome by Celestine I.