Theodore II

Theodore was a Roman, the son of a man named Photius, no relation to the patriarch, and he was elected in December 897 by the party that had thrown out Stephen VI and, probably, Romanus. He reigned twenty days, and used them. He summoned a synod that annulled the acts of the Cadaver Synod, declared Formosus's ordinations valid, and ordered the clergy who had been forced to renounce them restored to their ranks. Then he saw to the body. Formosus's corpse, thrown into the Tiber in the spring, had been pulled out by a monk, or by fishermen, depending on the account, and kept in hiding; Theodore had it brought back to Saint Peter's in procession, clothed again in vestments, and laid in its old tomb with the honors of a pope.

Theodore died before the year was out, apparently of natural causes, and was buried in Saint Peter's. Auxilius and Flodoard both praise him, for his learning and his charity to the poor, and for having done in three weeks what the situation required. The peace he made did not last: the anti-Formosan party elected Sergius, bishop of Caere, as soon as he was dead, and it took an emperor's support to seat John IX instead. But the verdict of the Cadaver Synod, once reversed, stayed reversed in the record, even after Sergius III came back to reaffirm it in 904.