Saint Paschal I

Paschal was a Roman, son of Bonosus, abbot of Saint Stephen's beside Saint Peter's, with charge of the pilgrims. He was elected on the day Stephen IV was buried and consecrated the next, 25 January 817, again without waiting for the emperor, and again the emperor let it pass. Louis the Pious sent instead the Pactum Ludovicianum, the charter that confirmed the papacy in its territories, promised no interference in their government, and guaranteed free elections, with the emperor merely to be told afterward. It was the high point of the settlement of 754, and Paschal used the peace to build.

He built in gold. Santa Prassede, with its chapel of San Zeno for his mother Theodora; Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, where he laid the saint's body in 821 after, he said, she had shown him in a dream where to find it; Santa Maria in Domnica: the apse mosaics of all three survive, with Paschal in them under the square halo of the living. He emptied the catacombs into Santa Prassede on a scale Paul I had not attempted, two thousand three hundred bodies by the inscription there, and he took in the Greek monks whom the second iconoclasm drove west after 815.

The end was ugly. At Easter 823 he crowned Louis's son Lothair emperor in Saint Peter's, and soon afterward two senior officials of the Frankish party, the primicerius Theodore and his son-in-law Leo, were blinded and beheaded in the Lateran.

He died on 11 February 824. The Romans would not let him be buried in Saint Peter's, and his successor laid him in Santa Prassede, among his mosaics.