Saint Agatho

Pope Agatho (577 – 10 January 681) served as the bishop of Rome from 27 June 678 until his death on 10 January 681. He heard the appeal of Wilfrid of York, who had been displaced from his see by the division of the archdiocese ordered by Theodore of Canterbury. During Agatho's tenure, the Sixth Ecumenical Council was convened to deal with monothelitism. He is venerated as a saint by both the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. He is said to have been the longest lived pope ever. The details of Agatho's early life are uncertain. It has been written that he was born in Palermo, Sicily, and was a Greek, whose parents died when he was young. After the death of his parents, it is said that he joined the monastery of San Giovanni degli Eremiti in Palermo. Due to the Rashidun Caliphate's raids on Sicily that began in 652, many Sicilian clergy had fled to Rome, and Agatho may have been among them. He served several years as treasurer of the church of Rome. He succeeded Pope Donus, and ascended to the papacy on 27 June 678, a Sunday. Shortly after Agatho became pope, Bishop Wilfrid of York arrived in Rome to invoke the authority of the Holy See on his behalf. Wilfrid had been deposed from his see by Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury, who had carved up Wilfrid's diocese and appointed three bishops to govern the new sees. At a synod which Pope Agatho convoked in the Lateran to investigate the affair, it was decided that Wilfrid's diocese should indeed be divided, but that Wilfrid himself should name the bishops. The major event of Agatho’s pontificate was the Sixth Ecumenical Council (680–681), following the end of the Muslim Siege of Constantinople, which suppressed Monothelitism, which had been tolerated by previous popes (Honorius I among them). The council began when Emperor Constantine IV, wanting to heal the schism that separated the two sides, wrote to Pope Donus suggesting a conference on the matter, but Donus was dead by the time the letter arrived.