Saint Hormisdas

Pope Hormisdas was the bishop of Rome from 20 July 514 to his death on 6 August 523. His papacy was dominated by the Acacian schism, started in 484 by Acacius of Constantinople's efforts to placate the non-Chalcedonians. His efforts to resolve this schism were successful, and on 28 March 519, the reunion between Constantinople and Rome was ratified in the cathedral of Constantinople before a large crowd. Hormisdas was born in Frusino in the moribund era of the Western Roman Empire. His Persian name was probably given in honour of an exiled Persian noble, Hormizd, "celebrated in the Roman martyrology (8 August) but not so honoured in the East." The names of his father and son suggest he had an otherwise "straightforward Italian pedigree." However, according to Iranica he was probably related to Hormizd. Before becoming a deacon, Hormisdas was married and had a son, Silverius, who later became pope. During the Laurentian schism, Hormisdas was one of the most prominent clerical partisans of Pope Symmachus. He was notary at the synod held at St. Peter's in 502. Two letters of Magnus Felix Ennodius, bishop of Pavia, survive addressed to him, written when the latter tried to regain horses and money he had lent the Pope. Unlike that of his predecessor Symmachus, the election of Hormisdas lacked any notable controversies. Upon becoming pope, one of Hormisdas' first actions was to remove the last vestiges of the schism in Rome, receiving back into the Church those adherents of the Laurentian party who had not already been reconciled. "The schism had lingered on largely out of personal hatred to Symmachus," writes Jeffrey Richards, "something with which Hormisdas was apparently not tainted." The account of his tenure in the Liber Pontificalis, as well as the overwhelming bulk of his surviving correspondence, is dominated by efforts to restore communion between the Sees of Rome and Constantinople caused by the Acacian schism.