Adeodatus I (Deusdedit), Pope, Saint

ADEODATUS I (Deusdedit), Pope, Saint. - A Roman, son of the subdeacon Stephen, he had been a member of the Roman clergy for forty years when he succeeded Boniface IV after four months of vacant see and was consecrated on 19 Oct. 615. He welcomed in Rome the patrician and cubicularius Eleutherius, sent by the emperor Heraclius to Ravenna to avenge there the killing of the exarch John and to Naples to expel from it the rebel tyrant John of Compsa. During his pontificate, Rome, politically tranquil, was devastated by an earthquake (Aug. 618), which was followed by a very severe plague. The Pontiff had, but for only a short time, scope to exercise his charity there.

Legend recounts that he healed the plague-stricken by kissing their nauseating sores. He renewed, extending it to all the churches of Rome, the constitution of Leo the Great which ordered the celebration of "a second mass" in each basilica. The expression is obscure: Duchesne interprets it as the order to celebrate liturgical offices in the evening in addition to the Eucharistic ones of the morning. He was the first to establish a special disbursement of silver without deductions (rogam unam integram) to each cleric of Rome on the occasion of his funeral. He was buried in the Vatican, and Honorius placed on his tomb an epitaph in Latin distichs. Although no ancient martyrology marks his name, the Church celebrates him as a saint on 8 Nov. The decretals attributed to him are spurious. Instead we possess from him the oldest papal seal known: a small cylindrical plate of lead which on one face bears the Good Shepherd with the letters alpha and omega and on the other the inscription: Deusdedit Papa.

Ireneo Daniele