Saint Eugene I

Eugene was a Roman priest of long service and great mildness, and he became pope in the worst way. Martin I had been arrested in June 653 and shipped to Constantinople; the emperor Constans II wanted a bishop of Rome who would accept the Typos, and the Roman clergy, under pressure from the exarch and afraid for the city, elected Eugene on 10 August 654, fourteen months before Martin died. Martin, in prison, was told of it, and his reply survives: he prayed that God would keep the faith of the man who now presided over the Roman church, and asked only to be remembered.

Eugene tried what the emperor wanted and found he could not. His envoys in Constantinople accepted a letter from the new patriarch Peter that fudged the question of Christ's wills so thoroughly that it spoke of one and two at once, and when the letter was read in Santa Maria Maggiore in 655 the clergy and people rose and refused to let the pope finish the Mass until he had rejected it. He rejected it. Constans threatened to roast him as he had roasted Martin, but the Arab fleet's victory off Lycia that year gave the emperor other things to think about, and the threat was never carried out.

He died on 2 June 657 and was buried in Saint Peter's; his feast is that day. His successor Vitalian would find the accommodation with Constantinople that Eugene had been prevented from making.