John III

John, born Catelinus, the son of a senator, was elected on 17 July 561 after a four-month wait for the emperor's confirmation, and for thirteen years the record of his pontificate is almost blank. Two letters survive. The Liber Pontificalis fills the gap with a story about a general. In 568 the Lombards under Alboin crossed the Alps and within a few years held most of northern Italy; the man who might have stopped them, Narses, had been dismissed by the new emperor Justin II and, insulted by the empress, had retired to Naples in a sulk. John went to Naples, persuaded the old eunuch to come back to Rome, and, since the Romans hated Narses for his taxes, moved out of the Lateran to live near him at the cemetery of Tiburtius and Valerian on the Appian Way, governing the church from a catacomb until Narses died in 574.

Elsewhere John restored two Gallic bishops, Salonius of Embrun and Sagittarius of Gap, whom a Frankish council had deposed for violence and debauchery, on their appeal; Gregory of Tours records that they went straight back to their old ways. He completed the basilica of the Apostles that Pelagius had begun and Narses had funded, the only Byzantine victory monument in Rome, and restored the cemetery churches outside the walls. He died on 13 July 574, in the catacomb, and was buried in Saint Peter's.