Saint Boniface IV

Boniface was a physician's son from the Marsi in the Abruzzo who had run the church's finances under Gregory the Great, and he waited ten months after his election for Phocas to confirm him, taking office on 25 August 608. The emperor then gave him a building. The Pantheon, Agrippa's temple to all the gods, rebuilt by Hadrian and closed for two centuries, was handed to the pope, and on 13 May 609 Boniface consecrated it as the church of Saint Mary and the Martyrs, the first pagan temple in Rome to become a church. Legend later had him bring twenty-eight wagonloads of martyrs' bones from the catacombs to fill it; the Liber Pontificalis says only that he dedicated it, and the building has been a church ever since, which is why it has a roof.

The English church came to him. In 610 Mellitus, bishop of London, attended a Roman synod on the discipline of the English mission and carried its decrees home. The Irish came at him. The abbot Columbanus, writing from Bobbio in 613 at the prompting of the Lombard king, sent the pope a letter about the Three Chapters schism that is the most extraordinary a pope had yet received: it told him to be vigilant, "for Rome is great and famous only through the chairs of Peter and Paul," reminded him that a pope who erred could be judged, and addressed him throughout as a beloved but sleepy father.