Vitalian (Latin Vitalianus) was elected Bishop of Rome on July 30, 657, and governed the Roman Catholic Church for nearly fifteen years until his death on January 27, 672. His substantial pontificate is principally significant for two interventions in the substantial post-Augustinian Anglo-Saxon Catholic mission.
First, the consecration and sending of Theodore of Tarsus to Canterbury in 668 AD. After the substantial Northumbrian Synod of Whitby of 664 AD had decisively settled the Anglo-Saxon Catholic question of Easter dating and tonsure in favour of the Roman tradition over the Celtic tradition (see Hilda of Whitby's entry already in the catalogue), the Anglo-Saxon Catholic Church urgently needed a substantial new Archbishop of Canterbury to consolidate the Roman-Augustinian Catholic establishment across the substantially unified Anglo-Saxon territory. The previous archbishop (Wighard) had died of plague during a visit to Rome in 668. Pope Vitalian — after substantial consideration — chose the elderly Greek monk Theodore of Tarsus (see Theodore of Tarsus's entry already in the catalogue) as the new Archbishop of Canterbury. Theodore's 22-year archiepiscopal governance (669–690) was the organizational moment of the unified Anglo-Saxon Catholic Church.
Second, the substantial Vitalian-period liturgical reforms at Rome that produced the early-medieval Roman-papal liturgical-musical tradition. Vitalian is recorded by substantial early-medieval sources as the pope of substantial systematic liturgical-musical reform at Rome — including the systematization of the chant-tradition that would eventually be codified as Gregorian chant (the continuous Roman-Catholic liturgical-musical tradition, named substantially incorrectly after the much-earlier Gregory the Great but in fact substantially codified in the Vitalian-period reforms).
He died at Rome on January 27, 672 AD.