Pope John Paul I Marin also said that Luciani would speak the Venetian dialect with those Venetian sisters to make them more comfortable, and to better interact with them. The religious also noted that the pope's humor was evident to all those who spoke with him, and he would often joke with the sisters when seeing his picture in the papers: "But you see how they got me", in reference to the quality of his picture. On 29 September 1978, 33 days into his papacy, John Paul I was found dead "lying in his bed, with a book opened beside him, and the reading
Byzantine Papacy regard Pope Theodore I, who reigned from 642 to 649, as the first Eastern pope of the Byzantine papacy). Boniface III was able to obtain an imperial proclamation declaring Rome as "the head of all the churches" (reaffirming Justinian I's naming the pope "the first among all the priests"), a decree Phocas intended as much to humiliate the Patriarch of Constantinople as exalt the pope. Phocas had a gilded statue of himself erected on a monumental column in the Roman Forum only three weeks after Boniface III's consecration, and in 609 by "iussio" authorized the conversion of the Pantheon into