ADEODATO I (Deusdedit), POPE, saint. – A Roman, son of the subdeacon Stefano, he had been part of the Roman clergy for forty years when he succeeded Boniface IV after four months of a vacant see and was consecrated on 19 October 615. He received in Rome the patrician and cubicularius Eleutero, sent by the emperor Eracllo to Ravenna to avenge there the murder of the exarch Giovanni and to Naples to expel its rebel tyrant Giovanni di Compsa. During his pontificate, Rome, politically tranquil, was devastated by an earthquake (August 618), which was followed by a very serious pestilence. The Pontiff had an opportunity, though only for a short time, to exercise his charity there.
Legend relates that he healed the plague-stricken by kissing their nauseating sores. He renewed, extending it to all the churches of Rome, the constitution of Leone Magno ordering the celebration of «a second Mass» in each basilica. The expression is obscure: Duchesne interprets it as an 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) for each Roman cleric on the occasion of his funeral. He was buried in the Vatican, and Onorio placed on his tomb an epitaph in Latin elegiac couplets. Although no ancient martyrology records his name, the Church celebrates him as a saint on 8 November. The decretals attributed to him are spurious. On the other hand, we possess from him the oldest known papal seal: a small cylindrical lead plaque bearing on one side the Good Shepherd with the alpha-and-omega symbol and on the other the inscription: Deusdedit Papa.