Sergius was born about the year 650 into a Syrian family from Antioch that had made its home at Panormus, the city we call Palermo, in Sicily. He grew up among Greek-speaking Christians of the East who had been driven westward by the upheavals of the age, and like many Sicilian clerics of those years, when the Caliphate's raids struck the island, he made his way to Rome. He arrived during the pontificate of Adeodatus II and entered the Roman clergy, where his learning in chant and Scripture and his steady character carried him forward step by step. On 27 June 683 Pope Leo II ordained him cardinal-priest of Santa Susanna, and he held that title until the day he was chosen to sit in the chair of Peter.
His election came out of a bitter storm. Pope Conon died on 21 September 687 after a long illness, and at once two men grasped for the papacy: the archdeacon Paschal, who had already bought the favour of John Platyn, exarch of Ravenna, and the archpriest Theodore, who had the backing of a larger faction and of the Roman aristocracy. According to the Liber Pontificalis, the two parties seized separate portions of the Lateran Palace and each proclaimed its own candidate, and armed men fought in the streets of Rome. To break the deadlock, the magistrates of the city, the officers of the militia, the greater part of the clergy and a crowd of citizens assembled in the imperial palace on the Palatine, elected Sergius, and carried him to the Lateran, forcing the rival claimants to accept him. Paschal only pretended to yield: he secretly promised the exarch a great weight of gold for military support. Platyn came, examined the case, acknowledged that Sergius had been lawfully elected — and then extorted the gold all the same before departing. Sergius was consecrated on 15 December 687, and with him the last disputed vacancy of the Byzantine papacy came to an end. Paschal continued to intrigue and was at length confined to a monastery on charges of sorcery; Theodore submitted and renounced his claim.
The new pope's heart turned quickly to the peoples of the North. On 10 April 689 he baptized in Rome the Anglo-Saxon king Cædwalla of Wessex, who had laid down his crown to be born again at the tombs of the Apostles. He consecrated Willibrord bishop of the Frisians, sending him back to the marshes of the Low Countries as the apostle of that nation, and he bestowed the pallium on Berhtwald, archbishop of Canterbury. The Roman Martyrology remembers him precisely for this: a man of Syrian origin who spent all his strength on the evangelization of the Saxons and the Frisians. He was a peacemaker as well as a missionary: in 698 he brought to an end the long and painful Schism of the Three Chapters with Old Aquileia, gathering back into unity a church that had been divided for generations.
In Rome he built and beautified. He founded the diaconia of Santa Maria in Via Lata along the Via del Corso, serving a quarter of the city that would flourish in the following century, and he restored and adorned the Eastern church of Santi Cosma e Damiano. He loved the sung prayer of the Church, and he himself composed a litany in Greek, preserved in the Psalter of Æthelstan, to be chanted on the feast of All Saints. To the Roman calendar he gave the great Marian feasts already dear to the East — the Purification of Our Lady, the Annunciation, her Nativity and her Dormition, which the Latin Church would later call the Assumption — and he ordered solemn processions with litanies to mark them, so that the whole city might honour the Mother of God.
The defining trial of his pontificate was the Quinisext Council, gathered by the Emperor Justinian II in Trullo in 692. Sergius did not attend; the assembly of some two hundred and twenty-six bishops was overwhelmingly Eastern, and it took the customs of Constantinople as the measure of orthodoxy, condemning usages of the West such as fasting on Saturdays, celebrating Mass on the weekdays of Lent, omitting the Alleluia in Lent, and depicting Christ under the figure of a Lamb; it also affirmed the right of married men to be ordained and set Constantinople as equal in privileges to old Rome. When the canons were sent to him for signature, the pope refused. He was a loyal subject of the Empire, but he would not be its captive in matters of religion, and he answered that he would rather die than consent to erroneous novelties. Then, with the boldness of a shepherd who teaches by what he does, he made his refusal visible in worship: he introduced into the Mass, at the breaking of the Host, the chant "Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us," sung in both Greek and Latin, and he restored the damaged mosaic in the atrium of Saint Peter's that portrayed the Adoration of the Lamb.
The emperor was enraged. Justinian sent an officer, also named Sergius, to arrest Bishop John of Portus, the chief papal legate to the Third Council of Constantinople, together with Boniface, the pope's counsellor; both were carried off to the capital as a warning. At length the emperor ordered the pope himself to be seized and dragged to Constantinople, as Pope Saint Martin I had been dragged half a century before, and entrusted the task to his notoriously violent bodyguard, the protospatharios Zacharias. But the militia of the exarchate of Ravenna and of the Duchy of the Pentapolis marched on Rome and surrounded the Lateran; Zacharias, terrified, came within an inch of losing his life. Here Sergius showed the greatness of his soul. He might have ridden the wave of anti-Byzantine feeling; instead he came out to the soldiers, calmed them, protected the man who had come to arrest him, and did all he could to quell the rising. He had defended the faith without vengeance and without rebellion.
Sergius died on 8 September 701, after nearly fourteen years as bishop of Rome, and was buried near Saint Peter. John VI succeeded him. He is venerated as a saint, and his memory is kept on 8 September; the Roman Martyrology recalls at Rome, near Saint Peter, the burial of Saint Sergius I, pope, of Syrian origin, who gave himself with all his strength to the evangelization of the Saxons and the Frisians, and who, facing many controversies and discords, preferred to die rather than to approve errors.
May Saint Sergius I obtain for us that same fearless fidelity, and may we imitate today his gentleness toward an enemy who came to seize him, refusing revenge even while refusing to yield one inch of the truth.
