St Gelasius

One does sometimes wonder if some of the saints on the official calendar really deserve to be there. Some of them simply appear to have done their job as might have been expected, lived decent enough lives, and died peacefully in their beds. One such, it might be thought with some justification, was Pope Gelasius I who was elected in 492 and died on 19^th November 496, but was buried on 21^st November which is why the latter date is his saint’s day.

His fame, such as it is, rests on him having been a highly efficient administrator who liked to get things in order. He therefore drew up lists of saints and martyrs and a compendium of important church decrees. Indeed, his renown for tidiness in religious matters has led to him being credited with drawing up the official canon of the Bible (i.e. which books deserved to be included), but there are a number of works that have been wrongly attributed to him, and the document in question is almost certainly one of them.

One positive claim to fame on his part is that he suppressed the festival of Lupercalia, an ancient Roman fertility rite that many Christians still observed. This festival celebrated fertility and purification (the name “dies februatus” is the origin of February), so Gelasius concentrated on the purification aspect and turned it into Candlemas to celebrate the purification of the Virgin Mary after the messy and defiling business of giving birth to Jesus.

Less positive, perhaps, was Gelasius’s confirmation of the split between Catholicism and Orthodoxy that has lasted to the present day. He was convinced that the supreme power on earth was the Church, and that the supreme power in the Church was the Pope, namely himself. That status therefore set him above the Byzantine emperor and the Patriarch of Constantinople, who could submit to the Pope’s authority if they wanted to, which they didn’t.

As a straightforward, no-nonsense Roman Catholic pope, he was clearly someone that later church leaders would have been encouraged to look up to, which is probably the main reason why he was given the status of “saint”.

© John Welford