Vigilius (Latin Vigilius) was a Roman patrician of the senatorial Anicii family who had served as papal apocrisiarius at Constantinople in the early 530s. He was personally chosen by the Empress Theodora to be the new pope after she had arranged the deposition and martyrdom of Pope Silverius (see Silverius's entry above for the catastrophic March 537 events).
Vigilius was installed as pope at Rome on March 29, 537, the same day as the formal deposition of Silverius — and at the cost of Silverius's life through the manipulations of Vigilius's own faction. The dishonourable origin of his pontificate has been the foundational difficulty of the cult ever since.
However, after his installation Vigilius unexpectedly refused to fulfill the terms of his secret agreement with Theodora (to restore the deposed Monophysite Patriarch Anthimus of Constantinople and to formally reject the Council of Chalcedon). He governed the Roman Catholic Church for the next eighteen years through the catastrophic continuous Justinianic-Gothic War in Italy, the foundational Theodoran-Justinianic Monophysite-revival pressure on the papacy, and the complex theological-doctrinal struggle over the Three Chapters Controversy that dominated his pontificate.
The Three Chapters Controversy: the Emperor Justinian I, in his prolonged attempt to find a Christological formula acceptable to both the Chalcedonian Catholic and the Monophysite factions, in 543 condemned three specific patristic writers (the so-called Three Chapters — Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret of Cyrus's writings against Cyril of Alexandria, and the letter of Ibas of Edessa to Maris) on Cyrillic grounds. The condemnation was supported by the Eastern Catholic Church but vigorously opposed by the Western Catholic Church (which viewed it as an implicit qualification of the Chalcedonian Christological definition). Vigilius was summoned to Constantinople in 547 and held there under increasing pressure for eight years.
Vigilius initially refused to condemn the Three Chapters (the Iudicatum of 548), then under continued pressure agreed to condemn them (the Constitutum I of 553), then refused to attend the formal Second Council of Constantinople of 553 (the Fifth Ecumenical Council), then refused to ratify the Council's condemnation of the Three Chapters, then was placed under formal arrest by Justinian, then — after further months of pressure — finally ratified the conciliar condemnation in December 553 (the Constitutum II of 554). The successive reversals damaged his authority and produced a substantial Western Catholic schism (the so-called Three Chapters Schism of northern Italy, which continued until the early 8th century in Aquileia).
Vigilius was finally permitted by Justinian to return to Rome in 554 after eight years of de-facto Constantinopolitan detention. He died en route at Syracuse, Sicily, on June 7, 555. His body was returned to Rome and buried at the Catacombs of Priscilla. His cult has been continuously observed at Rome but has never been formally entered in the universal Roman calendar.