BONIFACE I, Pope, Saint. - The funeral rites of Pope Zosimus had not yet ended when the archdeacon Eulalius, eager to succeed him, returned to the Lateran basilica with some priests and deacons of his faction. Having occupied the church, he was elected pope. But the other priests, about seventy of them, together with the part of the population opposed to Eulalius, assembled the following day in the church of Theodora and elected B., a learned and prudent Roman priest. On the following Sunday (29 Dec. 418) Eulalius was consecrated in the Lateran basilica and B. in the church of St. Marcellus. However, the prefect of Rome, Symmachus, who had sent to the court of Ravenna a report of the events rather favorable to Eulalius, received the order of the emperor Honorius to remove B. from the city. The question, however, was not settled: B. had powerful protectors at Ravenna, and Galla Placidia herself was favorable to him. The government, better informed, had to summon the two parties and submit the controversy to the examination of certain bishops. Since nothing was concluded, the emperor decided to convoke at Spoleto, for 13 June, a council to which the bishops of Gaul and Africa were also invited; in the meantime the two competitors were to be removed from Rome: if they attempted to return there, their election would be annulled. But Eulalius, having learned that the court had chosen the bishop of Spoleto, Achilleus, to celebrate the imminent Easter festivities in Rome, reappeared in the city on 18 March, so that when Achilleus arrived he found the place already occupied. The days preceding Easter passed very turbulently, with bitter disputes and riots, until the order came from Ravenna to expel Eulalius. The prefect Symmachus, however, had to use force, and having occupied the Lateran basilica, where the rebel had shut himself up, he handed it over to the bishop of Spoleto, who was thus able to celebrate the functions there. The attitude of Eulalius, by now led out of Rome under good guard, had resolved the question. B. was recognized as the legitimate Pope, and the bishops were informed that the announced council was by then useless.
The new Pontiff obtained from the emperor Honorius an edict that obliged the bishops to subscribe to the condemnation of Pelagius and Celestius, and at his invitation St. Augustine wrote the work Contra duas epistolas Pelagianorum. He devoted himself diligently to the hierarchical organization of the Church, intervening in Gaul in favor of the metropolitan Hilary of Narbonne against Patroclus of Arles, who had been favored by Pope Zosimus, and in Illyricum, where the emperor Theodosius II, in July 421, with an edict had transferred jurisdiction from the bishop of Thessalonica, vicar of the Pope, to the patriarch of Constantinople. With the help of the emperor Honorius, B. obtained the revocation of the unjust decree. From Africa, where in the meantime the question of Apiarius had been discussed, he received a somewhat resentful letter sent to him by the Council, assembled at Carthage in May 419, to inform him of the decisions taken. According to the Liber Pontificalis, B. forbade women to wash and touch the sacred linens, forbade clerics to enter the service of business enterprises, and ordered that in church only priests should put incense in the censer.
He died on 4 Sept. 422 and was buried on the via Salaria near St. Felicity: the Church honors him as a saint and celebrates his feast on 25 Oct.