St. Leo the Great, Pope, Confessor, and Doctor of the Church

St. Leo the Great saved Rome from the invasion of Attila. He defended the rights of the Holy See, and he condemned Nestorianism at the Council of Ephesus and the Monophysites at the Council of Chalcedon. He died in 461.

Pope St. Leo the Great's altar piece in St. Peter's Basilica, Rome, depicting the saintly pontiff turning Attila away from the city in that justly famous episode of 452.

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Lisa added more pictures of Maria to our April 2008 photo album.

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Just last month, Pope Benedict XVI spoke on Leo the Great, "One of the Greatest Pontiffs Ever." The complete translated text is available on Zenit. The following is an excerpt:

Leo the Great, constantly aware of his believers and of the people of Rome, but also of the communion between the various Churches and their needs, was a supporter and an untiring promoter of the Roman primacy, offering himself as the authentic heir of Peter the Apostle: the numerous bishops attending the Council of Chalcedon - mostly oriental - were fully aware of this.

Taking place in the year 451, with 350 bishops, this council was the most important assembly ever to be celebrated in the history of the Church. Chalcedon represented the end goal of the Christology of the previous three ecumenical councils: Nicea in 325, Constantinople in 381 and Ephesus in 431. Already in the 6th century, these four councils, which synthesized the faith of the early Church, were compared to the four Gospels, as Gregory the Great affirmed in a famous letter (I, 24), in which he declared we should "to accept and venerate, like the four books of the Holy Gospel, the four Councils" because, he explains further, on them "the structure of the holy faith arises as on a keystone."

By rejecting the heresy of Eutiche, which denied the true human nature of God's Son, the Council of Chalcedon affirmed the union in the one Person, without confusion and without separation, of the two natures, human and divine.

The Pope affirmed the faith in true God and true man Jesus Christ in an important doctrinal text directed to the bishop of Constantinople, the so-called "Tome to Flavianus," which was read in Chalcedon and was acclaimed by the attending bishops, registered in the, recorded in the acts of the Council in these words: "Peter has spoken through the mouth of Leo," the fathers of the council exclaimed together.

From this intervention, and from others made during the Christological controversy of those years, it is evident that the Pope felt the urgent responsibility of Peter's Successor, whose role is unique in the Church, because "only to one Apostle was entrusted what was communicated to all the apostles," as Leo affirms in one of his sermons on the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul (83, 2).

The Pontiff managed to exercise such responsibilities, in the West like in the East, by intervening in various circumstances with prudence, determination and lucidity through his texts and his bound manuscripts. In so doing he demonstrated the importance of the Roman primacy then, as much as today, in order to effectively serve the communion that is a feature of the one and only Church of Christ.