Extract from Eureka Street
- Home
- Vol 36 No 7
- Of presidents and popes
- Bill Uren
- 16 April 2026
There are always historical precedents, even for secular rulers attacking Christian popes. Indeed, the date itself, April 13, should remind us. For it is on April 13 that we celebrate the feast of Pope St Martin, and it is also the date on which in Australia we became aware of Donald Trump’s ill-mannered criticisms of Pope Leo.
Pope Martin was the last pope to be martyred. It was at the behest of a secular ruler like Donald Trump, the Byzantine emperor Constans II.
It was as a precocious ten-year-old that Constans II acceded to the co-emperorship of the Roman-Byzantine Empire in 641. The Empire was constantly under attack from external forces, both Arab and Muslim, and many of its richest provinces were surrendered to the enemy. Internally, too, the Empire was racked by divisions, surprisingly by disputes of a theological character.
The Council of Chalcedon had defined in 451 that there were two natures in the one person of Jesus Christ: a divine nature and a human nature. This was anathema to many Eastern theologians who espoused Monophysitism, that there was only one nature in Christ, the divine. A compromise theological position, Monothelitism, that there was only one will in Christ, the divine will, was sponsored by the long-serving Eastern emperor Heraclius in an attempt to reconcile the warring factions. Pope Honorius and the four patriarchs of the East — Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem — all supported Heraclius’s Monothelitic compromise, but the divisions were not healed.
So, in 648, the Emperor Constans II issued an imperial edict, the Tupos, which made it illegal even to discuss the topic of whether Christ had one or two wills. While the Tupos professed to maintain an impartial stance between orthodox Chalcedonianism and Monothelitism, it was perceived by Rome to favour the Monothelites by recognising their doctrine as a possible alternative for Christians. In response, Pope Martin I in 649 summoned 105 Western bishops to Rome and, in the Lateran Council’s twenty canons, censured Monothelitism, its authors, and its writings. It condemned not only the Tupos of Constans II but also the Ecthesis of a former patriarch of Constantinople, for which the revered emperor Heraclius had stood sponsor.
“Martin was the last pope to be martyred under a secular ruler. He was certainly not the last pope to come under attack for proclaiming orthodox Christian doctrine in the face of secular power.”
The reaction of Constans II was swift and decisive. He instructed his exarch in Italy to arrest the pope and to convey him to Constantinople for trial. It took three years before the exarch could carry out these orders, but in 653 Martin was arrested, tried, and condemned in Constantinople, and only saved from execution through the intercession of the patriarch of Constantinople. Instead, he was exiled to the Crimea where, enduring torture and starvation, he died in 655.
Martin was the last pope to be martyred under a secular ruler. He was certainly not the last pope to come under attack for proclaiming orthodox Christian doctrine in the face of secular power.
In the light of recent events, we do not have to look far to identify a contemporary parallel, even if it took April 13, the feast of St Martin, to remind us not only of the seventh-century precedent to President Trump’s remarks, but also that only too often the ways of politicians and secular rulers — “the end justifies the means” — are at a remove, sometimes scandalously so, from the principles of popes.
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