BONIFACIO 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 who were his supporters. Having occupied the church, he was elected pope. But the other priests, about seventy in number, together with that 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 December 418), Eulalius was consecrated in the Lateran basilica and B. in the church of S. Marcello. However, the prefect of Rome, Symmachus, who had sent the court at Ravenna a report of the events rather favorable to Eulalius, received the Emperor Honorius’s order to remove B. from the city. The matter was not yet settled, however: B. had powerful protectors at Ravenna, and Galla Placidia herself was favorable to him. Better informed, the government had the two parties summoned and submitted the dispute to the examination of several bishops. Since nothing was concluded, the emperor decided to convene 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 forthcoming 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 in great agitation amid heated disputes and riots, until the order arrived from Ravenna to expel Eulalius. The prefect Symmachus was nevertheless obliged to use force; having occupied the Lateran basilica, where the rebel had shut himself in, he handed it over to the bishop of Spoleto, who was thus able to celebrate the services there. Eulalius’s attitude, once he had been removed from Rome under close guard, resolved the issue. B. was recognized as the legitimate Pope, and the bishops were informed that the council that had been called was now unnecessary.
The new Pontiff obtained from the Emperor Honorius an edict obliging the bishops to subscribe to the condemnation of Pelagius and Caelestius, and at his invitation s. 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, by an edict had transferred jurisdiction from the bishop of Thessalonica, the Pope’s vicar, to the patriarch of Constantinople. With the assistance of the Emperor Honorius, B. obtained the revocation of the unjust decree. From Africa, where the case of Apiarius had meanwhile been discussed, he received a somewhat resentful letter sent to him by the Council assembled at Carthage in May 419, informing him of the decisions reached. According to the Liber Pontificalis, B. prohibited women from washing and touching the sacred linens, forbade clerics to enter the service of businesses, and ordered that in church only priests should place incense in the thurible.
He died on 4 September 422 and was buried on the Via Salaria near S. Felicita: the Church honors him as a saint and celebrates his feast on 25 October.