Vigilius Under Pressure, and a Reconciliation That Did Not Take

Pope Vigilius had been summoned, in effect brought under guard, to Constantinople years before the council met, and his relationship with Justinian through the whole affair was one of pressure rather than partnership. Vigilius resisted condemning the Three Chapters for years, worried that doing so would look like a retroactive attack on Chalcedon itself and would alienate Western bishops who saw no need to revisit a settlement they considered closed, and he was not present at the council's sessions when it finally opened in 553. Under continued pressure from Justinian after the council concluded its work, he eventually issued his own condemnation of the Three Chapters and accepted the council's decisions, a reversal that cost him support among Western bishops, some of whom broke communion with Rome over it in a schism that lingered in parts of northern Italy for more than a century.

The reconciliation with the Miaphysites that Justinian had hoped the council would produce did not materialize. Miaphysite church leadership in Egypt and Syria had by this point developed its own independent hierarchy and had little incentive to accept a settlement engineered from Constantinople, and the same churches, now generally called Oriental Orthodox, remain out of communion with the churches that accept Chalcedon and this council to the present day.