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The saints

St. Martin I

A pope kidnapped by an emperor for refusing to water down the truth about Jesus.

Feast: 13 April · died 655 · The early Church · Rome and Crimea

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Bronze statue of Pope St. Martin I seated, raising his hand in blessing.

Enric, 2022. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Home / The saints / St. Martin I

The Lateran, Rome, 649

Martin became pope in 649 when the emperor was backing a teaching that Jesus had no human will.1

Martin called a council at the Lateran that condemned it.1

The emperor had him seized in Rome and shipped to Constantinople.

Patronage No official patronage we can cite yet. The Church remembers him as the last pope venerated as a martyr.

01St. Martin I

Exile

He was put on trial, humiliated in public and exiled to Crimea.1

He wrote that he was hungry and forgotten, even by friends, and he died there in 655.1

Live it this week

Write to someone who is forgotten

Martin died in exile, feeling abandoned. This week, write to someone in prison, a missionary far from home or a shut-in who rarely hears from anyone.

Notes

How we know · 1 source for this page
  1. Franciscan Media, Saint of the Day: “Saint Martin I”. franciscanmedia.org. franciscanmedia.org

The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) is in the public domain; we quote the New Advent edition. Texts of the Holy See are quoted briefly from vatican.va. Scripture: World English Bible, Catholic edition (public domain); Verse numbers are modern, with Douay-Rheims numbers in brackets where they differ. Photographs: Wikimedia Commons, credited under each image; full list on the photo credits page.

Lines in the narrator’s voice, without a note, are our reflection, not a historical claim. Stone & Incense restates Church teaching in plain words; our wording is not an official Church text. Report an errorCorrections.