is our desire to restore the peace of the
Catholic faith to our commonwealth, to gain for my subjects the divine
protection. For those whom the same realm contains, the same worship
enlightens, what greater blessing can they have than to venerate with one
mind laws of no human origin, but proceeding from the Divine Spirit? Let
your Holiness pray that the divine gift of unity, so long laboured for by
us, may be perpetually preserved."[108]

Thus history tells us that, in the year 484, Acacius, bishop of
Constantinople, being condemned by Pope Felix, answered by striking the
name of Pope Felix out of the diptychs, and that, in the year 519, the name
of Acacius was erased from the diptychs in his own church; that his own
successor not only gave up his memory, but, together with 2500
bishops,[109] signed a formulary which attributes to the Roman See the
words of our Lord to St. Peter, which declares "that the Catholic religion
is ever kept inviolate in the Apostolic See," "in which the solidity of the
Christian religion rests entire and perfect," and which lays down the rule
that whoever does not live and die in the communion of the Roman See has no
claim to commemoration in the Church.

Let us now shortly review the facts which have passed under our notice
since St. Leo returned from his interview with the pirate Genseric in the
year 455.

In that fatal year the Theodosian house became extinct in the West so far
as government was concerned. Valentinian's miserable widow, daughter of the
eastern, wife of the western, emperor, during a short two months the prey
of her husband's murderer, became with her daughters the captive of the
Vandal freebooter, and saw the elder compelled to marry his son Hunnerich,
the future persecutor of the Church. Twenty years succeed in which emperors
are enthroned and pass like shadows, until the Herule general Odoacer,
commanding for the time the Teuton mercenaries, deposes the last imperial
phantom, Romulus Augustulus, and rules Rome and Italy with the title of
Patricius. The western emperor is suppressed.

In 457, the Theodosian house becomes extinct in the East by the death of
the emperor Marcian, before whom the heiress of the empire, St. Pulcheria,
granddaughter of the great Thedosius, had died in 453. He was succeeded by
Leo, a soldier of fortune, but an orthodox emperor, who supported St. Leo.
The emperor Leo reigned until 474, and after a few months, in which his
child grandson, Leo