The Council of Ephesus and the last German pope before Ratzinger

31 July 432. Sixtus III was elected; he was a Roman priest who had distinguished himself in the theological controversies concerning the figure of Jesus Christ and his mother Mary. As Pope, he approved the acts of the Council of Ephesus, which had concluded the previous year. The Council had resolved the theological dispute concerning the human and divine nature of Jesus – which had arisen between Cyril of Alexandria and Nestorius of Antioch – in favour of the former, thereby reconciling the differences between the two patriarchates. The Council had also bestowed upon Mary the title of Theotókos (‘Mother of God’) and, in the wake of the Council’s decisions reaffirming the divinity of Christ incarnate in the Virgin, Sixtus III dedicated the Basilica of St Liberius on the Esquiline Hill (rebuilt after the damage it had suffered decades earlier) to the worship of St Mary Major. The mosaics in the central nave constitute the oldest figurative cycle in a Roman church.

2 August 1057. Stephen IX (X), Frederick Gozzelon of the House of Lorraine, was elected. Before he was thirty, he became a cardinal (not a bishop) and later a monk and abbot at Monte Cassino. Close to Ildebrando of Soana, the future Gregory VII, he was part of the group of reformist cardinals brought together by Leo IX to reform the Church. His election by the cardinals took place in complete freedom following the death of Victor II and without waiting for the approval of Empress Agnes, regent for the young Henry IV. He was the last German Pope before Ratzinger; unlike his immediate predecessors, he was not a bishop at the time of his election and was not chosen by the secular authorities. Despite a pontificate lasting just eight months, he zealously continued the work of reforming the Church: he reinforced clerical celibacy and fought against marriage between blood relatives and against simony.

6 August 523. Ormisda died; before becoming a priest, he had been married and had a son named Silverius (who would later become Pope). Ormisda addressed the issue of the schism with the Eastern Church, which had arisen from Christological disputes and Patriarch Acacius of Constantinople’s refusal to accept the conclusions of the Council of Chalcedon in 415. The issue had profound geopolitical repercussions and dragged on for decades under various popes and emperors, as Rome demanded the posthumous condemnation of Acacius and full recognition of the council. The deadlock was broken in 519, when the new emperor Justin I and the Patriarch of Constantinople, John II, accepted Pope Ormisda’s conditions, bringing an end to the schism. The Pope had also commissioned the learned Scythian monk Dionysius the Little to translate the canons of the Eastern Church into Latin. Dionysius was the inventor of the new calendar based on the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, which his calculations placed in the year 753 from the founding of Rome. Today we know that he made some errors and that the birth of Jesus is to be placed between 7 and 4 BC.