ORMISDA, POPE, saint. — Son of Giusto, born in Frosinone; formerly a deacon of Pope Symmachus, he succeeded him in the pontificate on 20 July 514. A peaceful character, but an energetic guardian of the rights of the Church and defender of Catholic doctrine, he worked greatly to extinguish the two schisms that were afflicting the Church at the time of his election. At Rome there were still clerics who followed the antipope Lawrence (498–515), elected against Symmachus; upon O.’s accession they retracted their error, and after making public penance were restored to their offices. Much more important to resolve was the Acacian schism, which since 484 had separated the Church of the East from Rome. The patriarch of Constantinople, Acacius (v.), had accepted Zeno’s Henotikon, for which Pope Felix III had excommunicated him. The patriarch’s influence had drawn numerous bishops, devoted to imperial policy, into the schism, and the Catholics had been forced to endure persecutions and ill-treatment.
Shortly after O.’s election, the duke Vitalian, commander of the Danubian army, presenting himself as a defender of orthodoxy and peace, rebelled against the emperor Anastasius and marched toward Constantinople; the Emperor, frightened, accepted the conditions set by Vitalian, foremost among which was the restoration of union and peace to the Church, and asked O. to convene a council to settle the schism. But when, in August 515, O.’s legates arrived in Constantinople with the necessary instructions and a formula of faith to be signed in order to return to union, Anastasius refused to accept the papal provisions and sent the legates back.
After Anastasius died suddenly on 9 April 518, the praetorian prefect Justin, a convinced and fervent Catholic, was elected to succeed him. He first hastened to recall the bishops exiled by his predecessor, ordered everyone to accept the Council of Chalcedon in its entirety, and expelled all heretics, prohibiting them from holding any office. Then, in September, he wrote to O., asking for legates to settle the schism. In January 519 the Pope sent a legation led by the bishops Germanus and John and by the Alexandrian deacon Dioscorus (v.). Instructed on how to conduct themselves, the legates carried with them a formula of faith to be signed without discussion, which required the condemnation of Nestorius, Eutyches, Acacius, and other heretics more closely implicated in Monophysitism, as well as the complete acceptance of Pope Leo’s Tomus ad Flavianum. When they arrived in Constantinople in March 519, the legates were received with joy and with signs of respect and veneration by Justin, the Senate, the clergy, and the people. Dioscorus set forth excellently the reasons for Acacius’s condemnation, and the patriarch John signed the formula of faith, followed by many others. There was, however, resistance here and there, as at Thessalonica, where the bishop-legatus John was ill-treated by the people; but the Emperor’s authority succeeded in bringing the recalcitrant back to the right path.
Meanwhile, at Rome, O. had to concern himself with the question of the Acemet monks, who wanted the formula Unus de Trinitate passus est carne to be accepted. These monks, already rejected by the papal legates in Constantinople, had come to Rome to convince the Pope directly; O., warned in time, received them coldly and temporized, but since they were becoming increasingly turbulent and sowing discord, he drove them away in August 520.
A similar fate befell the Manichaeans, who were sent into exile and whose books were publicly burned. O. died on 6 August 523; the Roman Martyrology commemorates him on 16 August.