Saint Felix III

Felix was a Roman aristocrat, the son of a priest, a widower with children, and, by his own great-great-grandson's account, the ancestor of Gregory the Great. He was elected on 13 March 483 in the presence of Odoacer's prefect, who read out a decree in the dead pope's name forbidding the church to sell its property and reserving the king's consent for the election: the first time a lay ruler had put terms on the choosing of a pope, and a decree Symmachus would later annul.

The reign was consumed by the East. The emperor Zeno's Henotikon of 482, drafted by the patriarch Acacius, had tried to reunite the Monophysites by passing over Chalcedon in silence, and Acacius had admitted the Monophysite Peter Mongus to the see of Alexandria. Felix sent two bishops to Constantinople in 484 to summon Acacius to answer; they were imprisoned, threatened, bribed, and ended by taking communion with Peter's representatives. Felix deposed them on their return, and on 28 July 484 a Roman synod excommunicated and deposed Acacius himself. A monk of the Sleepless Ones pinned the sentence to the patriarch's vestment during the liturgy. Acacius struck Felix's name from the diptychs, and the churches of Rome and Constantinople were out of communion for thirty-five years.

He died on 1 March 492 and was buried in Saint Paul's Outside the Walls beside his wife and children, the only pope of the age laid in a family tomb. His feast is kept on the same day.