Hormisdas to Dorotheus, Bishop of Thessalonica

Considering that your Church, dear brother, was once closely united with the Apostolic See in the greatest bond of charity, despite the past evils of discord, we believed you would have recently been a promoter of the peace that has been restored. But because you have delayed in following what you should have hastened to anticipate, we groan over the delay in the correction of your fraternity. For you write that our ears have been disturbed by the atrocity of a certain crime. Would that this detestable rumor had only reached us and not announced such a grievous and abominable deed to the Christian minds throughout the entire world, so that those who do not know you to be innocent might believe that you have strayed from the path of Christianity itself.

In what part of the world does the infamy of this cruelty not grieve the Catholic Churches and gladden the perverse desires of the heretics? As you express in your letter, we wish to be shown to be free from the conscience of your love: for what more accords with our desires than that bishops who wish to return to Catholic peace should always be proven innocent of cruelty and crimes? We therefore expect, if your fraternity does not lack the means known to God to prove the truth, that you will both repel the accusation of such a crime from yourself and at last follow the examples of those who have returned to the reconciliation of faith.

Given on the fourth day before the Kalends of November, in the consulship of the illustrious Rusticus (year of our Lord 520).