Election and Struggle With Constantinople
He was a Roman. His father was named Avienus, according to the Liber Pontificalis. The name of the father suggests descent from members of the Roman Senate. A previous Avienus was Roman consul in 501.
Severinus was elected on the third day after the death of his predecessor, Honorius I, and the Papal apocrisiarii went to Constantinople to obtain imperial confirmation of his election in October 638. But Emperor Heraclius refused to grant his confirmation unless Severinus signed his Ecthesis, a Monothelite profession of faith. The envoys were unwilling to agree to this demand, but they were also unwilling to allow the Roman See to remain vacant indefinitely, so they offered to show Severinus the document and ask him to sign it if he thought it was correct. This offer was apparently satisfactory, and imperial recognition of the papal election was granted.
Before his death, however, Patriarch Sergius I of Constantinople had drawn up the Ecthesis in response to the orthodox synodical letter of Sophronius, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, and on learning of the death of Pope Honorius had convinced the Emperor to issue this document as an imperial edict in December 638, thus valid across the entire empire. Given directly to Eustachius, the magister militum, he carried it to the Exarch Isaac at Ravenna with instructions that he was to ensure the Pope’s acceptance.
With its declaration of Jesus Christ only possessing one will, Severinus refused to sign it. The exarch therefore refused to confirm the papal election in the Emperor’s name, a situation that endured for over eighteen months. In the meantime, Isaac was determined to achieve his aim, so he commissioned Maurice, the chartoularios, to plunder the Lateran palace and force Severinus to agree to the Ecthesis. Maurice gathered together a party of local discontented nobles and approached the local soldiers, the exercitus Romanus, and convinced them that the Pope had withheld their pay and was keeping the arrears in the Lateran. A mob soon formed and they rushed en masse to the palace.
Severinus managed to keep the hostile forces out of the palace. Maurice tried another tactic and three days later he was admitted into the palace with the city judges whom he won over to his side. They sealed up the treasures, and Maurice sent word to the Exarch that he was free to come to the palace and help himself to the accumulated riches. Isaac soon appeared, and after exiling the leading clergy within the Lateran, spent the next eight days looting the palace, prudently sending a share to the Emperor at Constantinople to prevent his displeasure.
Read more about this topic: Pope Severinus
Famous quotes containing the words election and, election and/or struggle:
“[If not re-elected in 1864] then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“Last evening attended Croghan Lodge International Order of Odd Fellows. Election of officers. Chosen Noble Grand. These social organizations have a number of good results. All who attend are educated in self-government. This in a marked way. They bind society together. The well-to-do and the poor should be brought together as much as possible. The separation into classes—castes—is our danger. It is the danger of all civilizations.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)