HE was a priest among the Roman clergy in 418, when pope Zozimus
condemned the Pelagian heretics. Sixtus was the first, after this
sentence, who pronounced publicly anathema against them, to stop their
slander in Africa that he favored their doctrine, as we are assured by
St. Austin and St. Prosper in his chronicle. The former sent him two
congratulatory letters the same year, in which he applauds this
testimony of his zeal, and in the first of these letters professes a
high esteem of a treatise written by him in defence of the grace of God
against its enemies. It was that calumny of the Pelagian heretics that
led Garnier into the mistake that our saint at first favored their
errors. But a change of this kind would not have been buried in silence.
After the death of St. Celestine, Sixtus was chosen pope in 432. He
wrote to Nestorius to endeavor to reclaim him after his condemnation at
Ephesus, in 431: but his heart was hardened, and he stopped his ears
against all wholesome admonitions. The pope had the comfort to see a
happy reconciliation made, by his endeavors, between the Orientals and
St. Cyril: in which he much commended the humility and pacific
dispositions of the latter. He says "that he was charged with the care
and solicitude of all the churches in the world,[1] and that it is
unlawful for any one to abandon the faith of the apostolic Roman church,
in which St. Peter teaches in his successors what he received from
Christ."[2] When Bassus, a nobleman of Rome, had been condemned by the
emperor, and excommunicated by a synod of bishops for raising a grievous
slander against the good pope, the meek servant of Christ visited and
assisted him in person, administered him the viaticum in his last
sickness; and buried him with his own hands. Julian of Eclanum or
Eculanum, the famous Pelagian, earnestly desiring to recover his see,
made great efforts to be admitted to the communion of the church,
pretending that he was become a convert, and used several artifices to
convince our saint that he really was so: but he was too well acquainted
with them to be imposed on. This holy pope died soon after, on the 28th
of March, in 440, having sat in the see near eight years. See his
letters, Anastasius's Pontifical, with the notes of Bianchini, &c.
Footnotes:
1. Ep. 1, ad Episc. Orient. p. 1236. Ep. decret. t. 1.
2. Ep. 6, and Joan. Antioch. contra Nestor.
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