Saint Hilarius

Hilarus, a Sardinian, had been Leo's archdeacon and his legate at the council of Ephesus in 449, where he had protested the deposition of Flavian of Constantinople in front of Dioscorus's mob, refused to sign, and escaped the city, he later said, by the help of Saint John the Evangelist. He kept his vow to the saint. Elected on 19 November 461, nine days after Leo's death, he built two oratories at the Lateran baptistery, one to John the Baptist and one to John the Evangelist, and inscribed the second "to his deliverer." Both stand, with their fifth-century mosaics.

His seven years were spent mostly on Gaul, whose bishops treated Rome as a court of appeal and each other as rivals. Hilarus ruled that Hermes of Narbonne, irregularly consecrated, could keep his see but not ordain; that Mamertus of Vienne had no right to consecrate a bishop at Die and that the man he had consecrated must go to Arles to be confirmed; and that Leontius of Arles should hold an annual synod. A Roman synod of 19 November 465, the earliest whose acts survive complete, forbade bishops to name their successors; he wrote to the Spanish bishops on the same points.

He endowed the Lateran and the basilica of Saint Lawrence with libraries, monasteries, and a chapel of the Holy Cross, and died on 29 February 468, a leap day, which is why his feast is kept on the twenty-eighth. He was buried at Saint Lawrence outside the Walls beside Sixtus III.