Simplicius, bishop, to Florentius, Equitius, and Severus, bishops.
Simplicius Strips Gaudentius of Aufinum of His Ordaining Authority and Three Parts of the Church’s Revenues, Nullifies His Ordinations, and Commissions Severus to Act in His Stead
The report of Your Charity has instructed Us, and the series of proceedings has more fully made known, that Gaudentius, the priest of the Church of Aufinum, contrary to the statutes of the canons and Our precepts, has perpetrated illicit ordinations — the whole power of which We command to be wholly taken away from him. For We have written to Severus, Our brother and fellow bishop, that (if it should be necessary) he himself, the rules of the Fathers being considered, may exercise in the aforesaid Church the office which that man is convicted of having abused: so that those who have been illicitly promoted by him be removed from ecclesiastical ministries. At the same time also, let him permit nothing to be lawful for one who does not know what befits him concerning the revenues of the Church or the oblation of the faithful — but let only one fourth portion from these be remitted to him. Two portions, to profit the ecclesiastical fabric and the distribution for pilgrims and the poor, let them be administered by Onagrus the presbyter under peril of his own order; and let the last be divided among the clerics themselves according to the merits of each. But as to the ministries of the Church which We have learned to have been alienated, let the usurper be compelled to restore them by the urgency of the aforesaid brother — upon whom We also specifically command this to weigh: that he restore those three portions which he is said to have claimed for himself alone for three years.
Given on the thirteenth day before the Kalends of December (A.D. 475), after the consulship of Leo Augustus.
Footnotes
- ↩ The manuscripts vary between Aufiniensis and Offiniensis (the latter is Burchard’s reading). The see is a small one in central Italy, within the immediate jurisdictional sphere of the Roman Church. The Latin sacerdotem in late-fifth-century usage routinely designates the bishop of a see (the chief priest of a local church); it does not mean “presbyter” here, as is clear from the context (Gaudentius performs ordinations, which is an episcopal act).
- ↩ The pairing of canonical statutes with papal precepts as joint standards of ecclesiastical discipline is a standard Roman formulation. Simplicius had used the same construction in Letter I to Zeno of Hispalis, charging him to prevent the transgression of “the decrees of apostolic institution” and “the boundaries of the holy Fathers.” Leo uses it repeatedly across his correspondence. The pairing treats conciliar canons and Roman decrees as coordinate authorities that converge in papal judgment; neither is subordinated to the other, and both are treated as cumulative standards binding on bishops.
- ↩ This is one of the earliest attestations of the fourfold division of church revenues that would become normative Roman discipline — one part to the bishop, one to the clergy, one to the fabric of the church, and one to the poor (here combined with the care of pilgrims). Gelasius, Simplicius’s second successor, would confirm and systematize the division in his own correspondence, and it remained the standard Roman rule governing episcopal income through the early medieval centuries. That Simplicius here treats the fourfold division as a known and applicable norm, and imposes it on a local church as a corrective measure against a bishop who had claimed the whole for himself, presupposes that the Apostolic See has the authority to regulate the distribution of a local church’s income and to rewrite that distribution when the bishop abuses it. The presbyter Onagrus is named as administrator “under peril of his own order” — that is, under threat of losing his clerical rank if he fails in the trust. (The PL prints ab Onagro as the main text, with a Bonagro as a manuscript variant.)
- ↩ Simplicius addresses not Gaudentius directly but the three Italian bishops commissioned to investigate and execute the judgment. Florentius, Equitius, and Severus serve as the Apostolic See’s executive for the case — reporting the facts to Rome, and then carrying out the sentence Rome hands down. Severus in particular is designated to step into Aufinum and perform the ordinations Gaudentius has forfeited. The structure is the same one Leo used in the Celidonius and Projectus cases in Gaul (Letter X, Chapters III–V): local bishops commissioned to act on Roman authority, executing a papal ruling handed down after Roman examination of the proceedings. The reader should note that the instrument — the Roman commission of local bishops to execute Roman judgment — is the same instrument visible across three pontificates now, applied here to suburbicarian Italy as it had been applied to Gaul.
- ↩ November 19, 475 (by the standard reading; November 18 by the variant decimo quarto). The date uses the post-consular formula — post consulatum Leonis Augusti — a standard convention referring to Leo I, the Eastern emperor who had held his fifth and final consulship in 473 and died in January 474. The letter is issued in the early years of Simplicius’s pontificate (468–483), during the final year of the Western Roman Empire; Romulus Augustulus would be deposed the following year (September 476). That the Apostolic See continues to judge the conduct of Italian bishops, commission local investigations, and impose specific administrative remedies as the Western imperial structure disintegrates is consistent with the pattern visible throughout Simplicius’s correspondence.
Historical Commentary