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Updated: May 15, 2025
As his successor was chosen Macedonius, sister's son of the former bishop, Gennadius, and like him of gentle spirit, "a holy man, the champion of the orthodox". However much the opinion was then spread in the East that a successor might rightfully be appointed to a bishop forcibly expelled from his see, if otherwise the Church would be deprived of its pastor an opinion which Pope Gelasius very decidedly censured Macedonius II. felt very keenly the unlawfulness of his appointment.
But Anastasius, bribed by the Alexandrian patriarch John II. with two thousand pounds of gold, required that he should anathematise this council. To this Macedonius answered that this could not be done except in an ecumenical council presided over by the bishop of Rome. The emperor in his wrath violated the right of sanctuary in the Catholic churches and bestowed it on heretical churches.
Macedonius could not be induced by threat or promise of the emperor to give up to him the paper in which at his coronation by Euphemius he had promised to maintain the Council of Chalcedon. The emperor, after concluding peace with the Persians, more and more favoured the Eutycheans, and seemed resolved either to bend or to break Macedonius.
When the deposed Euphemius asked of him a safe conduct for his journey into banishment, and Macedonius received authority to grant it, he went into the baptistry to give it, but caused his archdeacon first to remove his omophorion, and appeared in the garb of a simple priest to give his predecessor a sum of money collected for him. He was much praised for this.
But Faustus had hoped to gain the approval of Pope Anastasius to the Henotikon set up by the emperor Zeno at the instance of Acacius, and forced by the emperor Anastasius on his eastern bishops, and specially on three successive bishops of Constantinople Fravita, Euphemius, and Macedonius who took the place of the second, when he had been expelled by the emperor.
After him Macedonius, bishop of Constantinople, a distinguished semi-Arian teacher, being deprived of his office by the Council of Constantinople, in the year 360, in his exile founded the sect of the Pneumatomachi. He openly professed that the Holy Spirit is a divine energy diffused throughout the universe, and not a person distinct from the Father and the Son.
During fifteen years, from 496 to 511, as Euphemius had resisted the covert heresy of Anastasius, so did Macedonius, and, like him, he fell at last before the enmity of the emperor. Upon the deposition of Macedonius, the emperor obtained the election of Timotheus, who during seven years was his docile instrument.
Now the party of Severus, favoured by the emperor and many officials, broke out into loud abuse of Macedonius. Thereupon the faithful part of his flock rose for their bishop, and the streets rung with the cry, "It is the time of martyrdom; let no man forsake his father". Anastasius was declared a Manichean and unfit to rule.
The result was that Pope Hormisdas held a council at Rome in 518, at which all that had been done by his predecessors, the Popes Simplicius, Felix, Gelasius, and Symmachus, was carefully reviewed, and all present decreed that the eastern Church should be received into communion with the Apostolic See, if they condemned the schismatic Acacius, entirely effacing his name, and also expunged from the diptychs Euphemius and Macedonius, as involved in the same guilt of schism.
Thus he succeeded in overthrowing two bishops of his capital Euphemius and Macedonius neither of whom lived or died in communion with Rome, because, though virtuous and orthodox in the main, they would not surrender the memory of Acacius. They had, moreover, one grievous blot on their conduct as bishops.
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