St. Martin the Confessor

Martin was born at Todi in Umbria and rose through the Roman clergy, serving for a time as the representative of the apostolic see at Constantinople. He was raised to the see of Rome in 649, in the height of the struggle over the one will in Christ, when the imperial court was pressing on the Church a decree of silence, the Typos, that forbade the question to be discussed at all.

Martin would not be silent. In the year of his consecration he gathered a great synod of the Western bishops at the Lateran, more than a hundred Fathers, which set out the Orthodox confession of two natural wills and two operations in Christ and condemned the authors of the heresy by name. He sent the acts of the synod through the Church, that the faith might be known.

The Emperor Constans answered with force. Martin, old and sick with the gout, was seized in Rome, carried by sea to Constantinople, paraded through the city, tried on a charge of treason, stripped of his vesture, and led in chains before the people. He was condemned to death, and the sentence was commuted to exile in the wastes of the Crimea.

At Cherson he endured hunger, cold, and neglect, and from there he wrote letters of patience and resignation, grieving more for the silence of those who had abandoned him than for his own want. He reposed there of his sufferings on the sixteenth of September, 655.

The Church keeps his memory on the fourteenth of April, honouring the bishop of Rome who would not keep silent, whose Lateran Synod went before the Sixth Ecumenical Council, and who is counted the last of the Popes among the martyrs.