St. Agatho of Rome

Agatho was a Sicilian, by tradition a man of Greek speech and monastic formation, who came to the Roman clergy and was raised to the see of the city in 678, already advanced in years. His short pontificate fell at the moment the Church was to settle the last of the great christological questions.

The heresy of the age was Monothelitism, the teaching that in Christ, though there be two natures, there is but one will and one operation. The Emperor Constantine the Fourth, desiring peace and unity, summoned a general council at Constantinople and asked the Roman Church for its confession of the faith.

Agatho gathered a synod of the Western bishops at Rome and sent to the Emperor a letter, in the name of the apostolic see, confessing two natural wills and two natural operations in the one Christ, the human will freely subject to the divine. This letter was read at the Sixth Ecumenical Council in 681 and received by the Fathers as the voice of Peter, and its doctrine was written into the council's Definition of the faith.

Agatho did not live to hear the council's close; he reposed on the tenth of January, 681, while its sessions were still being held. The tradition of the Church remembers him as a man of great gentleness and as a worker of wonders, who healed the sick by the laying on of hands.

The Church keeps his memory on the twentieth of February, honouring the bishop of Rome whose letter gave the Sixth Ecumenical Council its dogmatic charter.