St Gelasius I

Pope (- c.496)

Saint of the day November 21

If the Church today is by and large free from the interference of civil authority, it is due to the unstinted efforts of the great pontiffs who have led the Church in difficult times. Gelasius I was one such pope who has left an indelible mark on Church- State relations, his Gelasian theory of the “two powers” earning him a special place in papal history.

Said to have been an “African by birth, whose father was Valerius”, Gelasius was a strong-willed archdeacon of the Roman Church and, as such, assistant to the pope. A strong defender of papal primacy, it was he who, on succeeding Felix III in March 492, studiously applied the principles of papal authority laid down by Leo I, expostulating on these principlçs in his letters to the Eastern emperors. In a bid to combat the Acacian heresy, he wrote to Anastasius I: “There are two powers by which the world is chiefly ruled: the sacred authority of the priesthood and the authority of kings”, implicitly telling the emperor to stay out of Church affairs since such imperial interference was the cause of much dissension in the Church Universal. He also emphasized that both sacred and civil power are of divine origin.

The first pope to be greeted as “Vicar of Christ”, Gelasius was also the first to insist on the reception of Holy Communion under both species. Furthermore, he is also credited with rooting out the last vestiges of paganism in Rome, even converting the ancient Roman festival of “Lupercalia”, i.e., the pagan festival of fertility, into the Feast of the Purification of Our Blessed Mother (a feast that has, of course, no relevance today).

St Gelasius breathed his last on 21 November 496 and was buried in St Peter’s, but the exact location remains unknown.