Vigilius

Vigilius was a Roman deacon whom the general Belisarius made pope in 537 after removing Pope Silverius (Marcellinus Comes, Chronicle continuation, under the year 537). The Liber Pontificalis, whose account of him is hostile and confused in its details, says that he was a Roman, the son of a consul, that he held the see for seventeen years, and that officers sent from the court arrested him in a church in Rome and shipped him to Constantinople (Liber Pontificalis 61 (Vigilius)).

There he was pressed to condemn the Three Chapters. The acts of the council of 553 say that he had done so more than once, by word and in writing, but then refused to act with the council and sent the emperor a judgment of his own, and that the emperor had his name struck from the diptychs (Council of Constantinople (553) session 7). In a letter of 8 December 553 he reversed himself, anathematized the Three Chapters and annulled what he had written in their defence (Council of Constantinople (553) letter of Vigilius to Eutychius) (The Second Council of Constantinople). He died at Syracuse on the way back to Rome (Liber Pontificalis 61 (Vigilius)). Gregory the Great, defending the council to bishops who still rejected it, speaks of him as a pope “of illustrious memory” (Gregory the Great, Letters 2.51).