exercise, of ecclesiastical right, a supervision over the whole Church.
Can any thing be conceived more diametrically opposed to the Papal system than this doctrine of St. Gregory?
Maurice having been killed by Phocas, Pope Boniface III. hastened to apply to the murderer, that he might obtain official recognition of the primacy of the Roman Church. He saw it imperilled by the title of œcumenical, that Maurice had granted to John the Faster. That pious emperor had been the chief support of the title taken by the Bishop of Constantinople. The Patriarch did not long enjoy the good graces of Phocas, whose violence he condemned, Rome made advances to the tyrant; Gregory the Great himself covered him with adulation; and Boniface III., who was raised to the see of Rome after the short episcopate of Sabinian, wrote to the murderer of Maurice, to ask for the same title of œcumenical that Gregory the Great had so energetically condemned.[1] It was generally understood that the Bishop of Constantinople assumed by this title to be the first in the Church. Accordingly, the historian of the Popes, Anastasius the Librarian, thus mentions this proceeding of Boniface III.:
"He (Boniface)[2] obtained from the Emperor Phocas, that the Apostolic see of the blessed Apostle Peter, that is to say, the Roman Church, should be the chief (caput, the head) of all the churches, because the Church of Constantinople wrote that she was the first of all the churches."
Paul the Deacon thus records the same fact:[3] "At the request of Pope Boniface, Phocas decreed that the see of the Roman and Apostolic Church should be the chief (caput) of all the churches, because the Church of
