Hormisdas

Hormisdas (Frosinone, c. 450 - Rome, August 6, 523) was the 52nd pope (from 514 to 523) and a saint of the Catholic Church.

Deacon at the time of his election, he was married before being ordained and had a son who would later become the future Pope Silverio.

His first action as pontiff was to put an end to the last embers of the Acacian schism that arose in 484 through the so-called "Formula of Hormisdas" proposed in 519 after a meeting between the Churches of Rome and Constantinople.

During his papacy, he commissioned Dionysus the Meager, an astronomer of Scythian origin and abbot of a Roman monastery, to reform the existing calendar, a task he resolved by establishing the first year of the Christian era as the year of the birth of Jesus. The calculations that he made were, as it was later verified, wrong by about 6 years when they erroneously dated the reign of Herod I the Great, for which he deduced that Jesus was born in the year 753 of the founding of Rome, when in fact he should have happen towards the 748.

He was elected pope in the presence of the famous Cassiodoro, then consul, and King Theodoric's delegate for this election. He managed, with the third delegation that he sent to Constantinople, to reconcile this Church with the Holy See, from which it had been separated since the condemnation of Acacius. His pontificate was glorious for the vigor with which he upheld the doctrine, for the reform of the clergy, for the peace he procured for the Eastern Churches, for the expulsion of the Manichaeans from Rome, and for his alms and liberalities with the Saints. Places. Hormisdas died on August 6, 523.