Commontide
Ecumenical Commemoration
Bishop of Rome, Missionary, & Doctor of the Church
March 12 · d. 604
Gregory the Great, born at Rome about 540, held the city's highest civil magistracy before giving away his family's Sicilian estates to found six monasteries and turning the family house on the Caelian Hill into a seventh. Elected pope in 590 against his own protest, he governed Rome through plague, famine and the Lombard wars for fourteen years, wrote the Pastoral Rule and the Moralia in Job, and sent Augustine and forty monks to the English. He died on 12 March 604 and was acclaimed a saint at once.
Gregory was born at Rome around the year 540, into a wealthy senatorial family that had already given the city a bishop. His father Gordianus held estates in Sicily and a mansion on the Caelian Hill; his mother Silvia is remembered as a saint in her own right, and two of his father's sisters, Tarsilla and Aemiliana, were consecrated virgins. Gregory studied grammar, rhetoric and dialectic, and Gregory of Tours, who was alive at the same time, called him second to none in all Rome in those arts. By his early thirties, about 573, he held the highest civil magistracy in the city.
Then, about 574, he gave it all up. The Sicilian estates went to found six monasteries. The house on the Caelian Hill became a seventh, the monastery of St. Andrew, and Gregory entered it as a monk. Long afterwards, as pope, he called those years the happiest of his life.
The Church did not leave him there. In 578 he was ordained one of the seven regional deacons of Rome, much against his will, and sent to Constantinople as the pope's permanent ambassador to the imperial court. He spent roughly six years at a court he never trusted, keeping a small monastic household of brothers from his own house, and never learning Greek, as he freely admitted. It was there, at the urging of his friend Leander of Seville, that he began lecturing to those brothers on the book of Job, lectures that grew into the thirty-five books of the Moralia. He was writing on undeserved suffering before the worst of his own arrived.
He came home about 585 and became abbot of St. Andrew's. Then in February 590 the Tiber flooded, plague followed, and Pope Pelagius II died of it. The clergy, the senate and the people of Rome acclaimed Gregory in his place. He did not want it. He wrote personally to the Emperor Maurice asking him to withhold confirmation; the letter was intercepted, or the request refused. On 3 September 590 he was consecrated at St. Peter's.
The plague was still in the city. Gregory's answer was to summon the whole of Rome to penance, ordered by state of life: clergy, monks, nuns, children, laymen, laywomen, widows and the poor, seven processions converging on Santa Maria Maggiore. That is the shape of everything he did afterward. He wrote the Pastoral Rule on what a bishop must be, and its first sentence is his whole mind: the government of souls is the art of arts. He held a synod at St. Peter's in July 595. He negotiated directly with the Lombard dukes and with King Agilulf, funding the defence of the city himself when the emperor's protection proved more nominal than real, and articles of peace were signed in 599. He wrote to Agilulf's Catholic queen, Theodelinda, rejoicing at her son's baptism, thanking her for labouring toward peace in a wrecked country, and grieving that unskilled men had drawn her toward breaking communion with Rome. He administered the Roman church's estates down to the treatment of individual tenant farmers and the freeing of individual slaves, and he did it while sick, complaining across his letters of gout, indigestion and recurring fever.
And in 596 he sent Augustine, the prior of his own monastery, with about forty monks to the English. They landed in Kent in 597 and King Æthelberht was converted. Gregory kept writing to them. In one letter of June 601, carried by Mellitus, he told Augustine not to destroy the temples of the idols but only the idols in them, to bless the buildings with water and set up altars there, so that the people would come with more familiarity to places they were used to. It is impossible, he wrote, to cut away everything at once from hard hearts, since one who strives to ascend must rise by steps and not by leaps.
There is a story about why he cared, and it is worth telling as the English themselves told it. A monk or nun of Whitby wrote it down about a century after his death, and Bede repeated it in 731, saying plainly that he had it only from the tradition of his ancestors. Gregory, in the market at Rome, saw fair-haired boys put up for sale, asked where they came from, and was told Britain; asked whether they were Christians, and was told they were not. He sighed from the bottom of his heart, said it was a pity that the author of darkness should own men of such fair faces, and asked what the nation was called. Angles, he was told. "Right," he said, "for they have an angelic face, and it is meet that such should be co-heirs with the Angels in heaven." Whether he ever spoke those words no one can now prove. What is documented is that he instructed his agent Candidus, who managed the church's estates in Gaul, to buy English boys of seventeen or eighteen so that they might be given to God in monasteries. The care was real even where the scene cannot be verified.
He kept at it to the end. He refused, twice admonished by the emperor himself, to let the patriarch of Constantinople be called Universal Priest, holding that whoever wants such a name puts himself above all others; he signed himself instead servant of the servants of God. He died at Rome on 12 March 604 and was buried the same day in the portico of St. Peter's. There was no canonization process, because there was not yet such a thing. The people simply called him a saint, and the veneration survived even a reaction against his memory in Rome soon afterward, because far away in England they had not forgotten who sent Augustine. They called him Gregorius noster, our Gregory. A man who tried twice to be left alone with God in a monastery ended by giving a whole nation to God instead, and the book he wrote about the burden he never wanted was still teaching bishops a thousand years later.
You are probably not being asked to govern a plague-struck city, but you have almost certainly been handed something you did not want and do not feel equal to. Gregory wrote to an emperor trying to get out of it. When that failed he did not shrink the job to fit his willingness; he wrote the book on how to do it, and the first thing he said was that no one presumes to teach an art without first learning it, and that the government of souls is the art of arts. He also warned, about his own order, that no one does more harm in the Church than a man with the name and rank of holiness who acts perversely. He knew both dangers from the inside: the reluctance and the position. What is the thing you have been given that you keep hoping someone will take back, and what would it look like to learn it instead?
The evidence for Gregory is unusually good for the sixth century, and it is good in his own hand. Roughly 854 of his letters survive in copies, the largest single batch of 686 copied by order of Pope Adrian I between 772 and 795, evidently to rescue them from the perishing papyrus rolls kept in the Lateran. Alongside the register stand the Moralia in Job in thirty-five books, the Pastoral Rule, forty Homilies on the Gospels, twenty-two Homilies on Ezekiel preached during the Lombard siege of 592 to 593, and the four books of the Dialogues. For anything Gregory actually did, thought, negotiated or suffered as pope, the letters are the spine, with the usual caution that correspondence is self-presentation and that we have what a later century chose to copy.
External witnesses are thinner and later. Gregory of Tours, a Frankish bishop writing during Gregory's lifetime, supplies contemporary confirmation of his reputation for learning; the Liber Pontificalis gives terse chancery vitals. The first connected biography of Gregory anywhere was written not at Rome but in England, by an anonymous monk or nun of Whitby around 704 to 714, and it survives in a single ninth-century continental manuscript, St. Gallen Cod. Sang. 567. Bede drew on it, and on Roman archive letters copied for him by the priest Nothhelm, for the fullest early account, in the Ecclesiastical History of 731. Rome produced no Life of its own until John the Deacon wrote one in 873 at the commission of Pope John VIII, nearly two hundred and seventy years after the death. That gap is itself a historical fact, and it explains why the earliest strong devotion to Gregory is English rather than Roman.
Several points are genuinely contested, and are better shown than smoothed. The birth year of about 540 rests on modern inference from a remark in Dialogues III.2, not on any ancient statement. The civil office he resigned is called the Prefecture of the City by the Catholic Encyclopedia and Praetor Urbanus by the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers prolegomena; these are different offices, the disagreement is real, and "the highest civil magistracy in the city" is the honest hedge. The date of his deacon's ordination, 578, is agreed, but the ordaining pope is not: one source declines to name him, the other judges it most probably Benedict I, with Pelagius II sending him east later that same year. Bede states that Gregory died in 605, after governing thirteen years, six months and ten days; that reign-length, counted from 3 September 590, lands in March 604, and the standard resolution is that his sources reckoned the year differently. The resolution is plausible and is not independently confirmed.
Two attributions that everyone knows should be handled as later tradition rather than fact. Modern musicology does not assign the developed chant repertory called Gregorian to Gregory himself; Willi Apel and Robert Snow treat the ascription as a later legitimating claim, while Andreas Pfisterer and Peter Jeffery have argued for a possible earlier core, and no consensus places the repertory in his hands. Similarly, the idea that Gregory launched the spread of the Rule of St. Benedict across the West is a later development: he praised the Rule warmly in Dialogues II.36, and he wrote the only substantial Life of Benedict we have, but the Dialogues did not circulate widely in Spain and Gaul until the 630s, and the Rule's authority was built in the seventh and eighth centuries. One further legend can be corrected outright: the medieval story, propagated chiefly by Martin of Troppau, that Gregory destroyed the Palatine and Capitoline libraries and smashed classical statuary has no basis. Tilmann Buddensieg's 1965 study treats it as a retrojection onto Gregory's name of real Christian destruction of pagan art in the fourth and fifth centuries, long before he was born.
Gregory is one of the four great Latin Doctors, with Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine of Hippo, a grouping already commonplace among the Scholastics and ratified in 1298 when Boniface VIII decreed in the sixth book of the Decretals that the four should have their feasts kept as doubles throughout the Church. In art he is vested as pope, with pen and book, and carries the one attribute the other three Doctors do not: a dove at his ear. The story behind it is late, eighth or ninth century, told by Peter the Deacon and transmitted through John the Deacon's Life. Gregory was dictating the Homilies on Ezekiel; his secretary, impatient at the long silences, bored a hole in the curtain hung between them and saw a dove with its beak between Gregory's lips, withdrawing it whenever Gregory spoke. The oldest great images of the scene are a Carolingian ivory of about 850 in Vienna and the frontispiece of the Registrum Gregorii made for Archbishop Egbert of Trier shortly after 983.
A second legend attached itself separately. Paul the Deacon, in the eighth century, told of a woman who laughed at Communion because she had baked the bread herself and doubted it could be Christ's body, and of the host becoming a bleeding finger at Gregory's prayer. From about 1350, when a Byzantine icon at Santa Croce in Gerusalemme was identified with the vision, the Mass of St. Gregory spread across Europe: Robert Campin about 1440, Dürer's woodcut of 1511, ten separate engravings by Israhel van Meckenem, and, most remarkably, an Aztec feather mosaic of 1539 made for Diego Huanitzin to present to Pope Paul III.
His body was buried in the portico of Old St. Peter's, relics went to Soissons in 826, and after the demolition of the old basilica the remains were moved again in 1606, resting now in a marble sarcophagus beneath the Altar of St. Gregory the Great in the Clementine Chapel, under Andrea Sacchi's Mass of St. Gregory. His own house survives in altered form as San Gregorio Magno al Celio, cared for by Camaldolese Benedictines, which keeps his marble cathedra. His traditional feast is 12 March, his death day, still kept in the older Roman Martyrology, in the pre-1969 Roman Calendar, and in the Eastern churches, which know him as Gregory the Dialogist; the reformed Roman calendar of 1969 moved him to 3 September, the day of his consecration, because 12 March falls in Lent.
The essential texts are Gregory's own. The Pastoral Rule and a selection of the letters were translated by James Barmby in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, volumes 12 and 13 (1895 and 1898), still the standard free English version; the quotations above are from that translation, at Pastoral Rule I.1 ("the government of souls is the art of arts"), I.2 (on the harm done by rank without holiness), Registrum VII.33 to Maurice, written in 596 or 597 concerning Patriarch Cyriacus (the Universal Priest passage), and Registrum XI.76 to Mellitus, dated 17 June 601 (the temples and idols, and the ascent by steps and not by leaps). Anyone citing letter numbers in print should cross-check the Maurist numbering Barmby follows against the critical editions: Paul Ewald and Ludo Moritz Hartmann in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, and Dag Norberg, Registrum epistularum, CCSL 140 and 140A (Brepols, 1982). The Moralia in Job passages, including the dedicatory epistle to Leander of Seville with its image of a river shallow enough for the lamb and deep enough for the elephant, are quoted from James Bliss's translation in the Library of the Fathers, Morals on the Book of Job (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1844); the critical text is Marc Adriaen's, CCSL 143, 143A and 143B. The Homilies on Ezekiel are edited as CCSL 142 (1971) and have no complete free English translation online. Bede's account, including the slave-market anecdote and the disputed date of death, is quoted from A. M. Sellar's revised translation, Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England (London: George Bell and Sons, 1907), at II.1. The earliest biography is edited and translated by Bertram Colgrave, The Earliest Life of Gregory the Great, by an Anonymous Monk of Whitby (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1968). Two early vernacular translations belong here as well: King Alfred's Old English Pastoral Care of the 890s, surviving in six pre-Conquest manuscripts, and Wærferth of Worcester's Old English Dialogues of about the same date. On the libraries legend, see Tilmann Buddensieg in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 28 (1965).
Gregory is said of grex, which is to say a flock; and of gore, which is to say a preacher. Then Gregory is to say as a preacher to an assembly or flock of people. Or it is said as a noble doctor or preacher. Or Gregory is to say in our language as awaked, for he awoke to himself, to God, and to the people, he awoke to himself by keeping of cleanness, to God by good contemplation, and to the people by continual predication. And by this is deserved the vision of God; and S. Austin says, in the Book of Order, that he sees God that well lives, well studies, and well prays. And Paul, the historiographer of the Lombards, writes his history and life of him, the which John the deacon afterwards much diligently compiled and ordained.
S. Gregory was born of the parentage of senators of Rome, whose father was named Gordian and his mother Silvia. And when he had so much learned that he was a master in philosophy, and also was rich of patrimony, he thought that he would leave all the riches that he had, and would enter into religion for to serve God. But in this, that he put this thought in respite, he conceived another purpose, that was that him seemed he should better serve God in a secular habit, in doing the office of the pretoria of the provost of Rome, for to give to each man duly reason after the nght of his cause. But he found in this office so great secular business that it began to displease him, because by this great business he withdrew him over far from God. In this meanwhile his father and mother died, in such wise that he was rich of patrimony and puissant, that at the beginning he founded and endowed with rents six abbeys in Sicily, and the seventh he founded within the walls of Rome in the honour of S. Andrew the apostle, in the which he became a monk, and the remnant of his patrimony he gave for God's sake so that he that tofore went clothed in clothes of gold and of silk, and adorned with precious stones in the city, when he was monk served in a poor habit the monks. There was at the beginning of his conversation of so perfect a life that it might be said well that he was all perfect. He made great abstinences in eating, in drinking, in waking, and in praying, in so much that he was so travailed that unnethe he might sustain himself. He had put out of his heart all secular things so that his conversation was in heaven, for he had addressed all his desire for to come to the joy permanable.
On a time it happed that, S. Gregory in his cell of the same abbey whereas he was abbot wrote something, and an angel appeared to him in semblance of a mariner, which seemed as he had escaped from the tempest of the sea, and prayed him weeping to have pity on him. Then S. Gregory commanded that there should be given to him six pence, and then he departed. The same day the angel came again in like wise as he did tofore, and said that he had lost all his good, and prayed him that he would yet help him; on whom S Gregory had yet pity, and did to be given to him six pence more, yet at the third time he came and made great cry and wept, and prayed him that he would yet help him toward his great loss, so that S. Gregory commanded his provost that he should yet give to this poor man an alms. And the provost said that there was no more silver in all the abbey, but a dish of silver in which his mother was wont to send him pottage. And S. Gregory commanded anon that that dish of silver should be given to him and the angel took it with great joy. And little while after, this angel appeared to S. Gregory and said to him that God has sent him so to him.
It happed afterward that as S. Gregory passed through the market of Rome, and saw there two fair children white and ruddy of visage, and fair yellow hair which were for to sell. And S. Gregory demanded from whence they were, and the merchant answered, of England. After S. Gregory demanded if they were christian, and he answered: Nay, but that they were paynims. Then sighed S. Gregory and said: Alas, what fair people has the devil in his doctrine and in his domination. After he demanded how these people were called: he answered that they were called Angles men; then he said they may well be so called for they have the visage of angels. And for that S. Gregory went to the pope, and by great prayers he impetred and had grant that he was sent in to England for to convert the people of that same country, but when the Romans heard say that Gregory was sent into England, anon they went to the pope and said to him: You have angered S. Peter, you have destroyed all Rome, and hurt all holy church in this that you have let Gregory go out of Rome. Of which word the pope was angry and much abashed, and sent anon his messengers after S. Gregory, and commanded him to return and come again to Rome, which then was gone on his journey three days, and for his noble and good renomee the pope made him cardinal deacon. After, for the corruption of the air, the pope Pelagius died, and then S. Gregory was elect of all the people to be pope, but he refused it and said that to that dignity he was not worthy, and for the right great mortality, ere that he was sacred pope he made to the people a sermon and said: Right dear brethren, well ought we to have doubt of the scourge of God ere that we feel it, and yet we ought to fear it, and to turn and forsake our sins, lo! you may behold the people die ere they beweep their sins; think you then in what point he comes in the presence of the judge that has had no time to bewail his sins. The houses be void, the children die in the presence of father and mother, suddenly, so that they have little time to die, wherefore every man amend his life while he has time for to repent him of his evil deeds and sins, ere that the judge call him from the mortal body. He says by the prophet, I will not the death of a sinner, but I will that he return and live; much soon the judge hears the sinner when he converts from his sins and amends his life. By such manner admonested he to the people their health, and he ordained to make procession in all the churches much solemnly for to impetre and get mercy for this mortality. When the procession was done he would have gone privily out of Rome, for to eschew the office of the papalty, but against that the gates were kept so that he might not issue. At the last he did do change his habit, and so much did with the merchants that they brought him out of Rome in a tun upon a cart. And when he was far out of the town, he issued out of the tun and hid him in a ditch, and when he had been therein three days the people of Rome sought him all about. Anon they saw a pillar shining descend from heaven straight upon the ditch in which S. Gregory was; and a recluse, a holy man saw that by that pillar angels descended from heaven to S. Gregory and after went up again. Anon then S. Gregory was taken of the people and after the ordinance of holy church he was ordained and sacred pope against his will, for he was much debonair, humble and merciful to rich and poor, and to great and small. Well may he apperceive that reads his writings how oft he complained of this great charge that he was charged withal, to which he said he was not worthy thereto, and also he might not hear that any should praise him, ne in letters ne in words. And alway he was in great humility and accounted himself more meek and low after that he was pope than tofore, insomuch that he was the first of the popes that wrote: Servus servorum Dei, that is, servant of the servants of God. He had great cure and was busy to convert sinners; he made and compiled many fair books, of which the church is greatly illumined. He was never idle, how well that he was always sick. He converted the English people to the christian faith by three holy men and good clerks that he sent thither, that is to wit Augustin, Mellitus, and John, for to preach the faith. And because the mortality ceased not, he ordained a procession, in the which he did do bear an image of our Lady, which, as is said, S. Luke the Evangelist made, which was a good painter, he had carved it and painted after the likeness of the glorious Virgin Mary. And anon the mortality ceased, and the air became pure and clear, and about the image was heard a voice of angels that sung this anthem: Regina cæli lætare, etc., and S. Gregory put thereto: Ora pro nobis, deum rogamus, alleluia. At the same time S. Gregory saw an angel upon a castle which made clean a sword all bloody, and put it into the sheath, and thereby S. Gregory understood that the pestilence of this mortality was passed, and after that it was called the Castle Angel.
S. Gregory did every day so great alms that many in the country about were nourished by him, whom he had by name written, and also the monks that dwelt in the Mount Sinai had of him their sustenance. Among all other alms that he did he governed three thousand virgins, to whom he sent every year four score pound of gold, and also he founded to them an abbey in Jerusalem, and sent to them that therein were such things as they lacked. Every day had he poor men to dinner. On a time it happed that he took the laver for to give water to a pilgrim for to wash his hands by great humility, and anon the pilgrim vanished away, whereof S. Gregory had marvel. The night after our Lord appeared in a vision and said to him: The other days you have received me in my members, but yesterday you receivedst me in my person.
Another day S. Gregory commanded to his dispenser that he should bring to dinner twelve poor men, and when S. Gregory and the poor men were set at meat, he told at the table sitting thirteen poor pilgrims, and demanded of his dispenser why he had done above his commandment to bring in more than twelve persons. And anon the dispenser, all abashed, went and told the poor men, and found but twelve, and said to S. Gregory: Holy father, there be no more but twelve, and so many shall you find and no more. Then considered S. Gregory that, one of the pilgrims that sat next to him oft changed his visage, for oft he seemed young, and after old. And after dinner S. Gregory took him by the hand and brought him into his chamber, and prayed him that he would tell him his name. And he answered: Wherefore demandest thou my name, which is marvellous? Nevertheless know you well that I am the same poor mariner to whom you gave the dish of silver in which your mother was wont to send the pottage, and know for certain that sith that day that you didst to me that alms, God has destined you to be pope. And said moreover: I am the angel of God, and he has sent me hither to you to be your defender and procurer of that which you would demand and impetre of him, and after this the angel vanished away.
And in that time there was an hermit, an holy man, which had left and forsaken all the goods of the world for God's sake, and had retained nothing but a cat, with which he played oft, and held it in his lap deliciously. On a day it happed that he prayed God devoutly that he would vouchsafe to show to him to what saint he should be in like joy in heaven, because for his love he had left all the world and renounced. Upon this God showed him in a vision that S. Gregory and he should have like joy in heaven. And when he understood this he sighed sore and praised little his poverty, which he had long suffered and borne, if he should have Iike merit which abounded so greatly in secular riches. Upon this there came a voice to him which said that: The possession of riches makes not a man in this world rich, but the ardour of covetise. Then be still you, dare you compare your poverty to the riches of S. Gregory which love more your cat, with whom you cease not to stroke and play, than S. Gregory does all his riches, for he ceases never to give alms for God's sake? Then the hermit thanked Almighty God, and prayed that he might have his merit and reward with S. Gregory in the glory of paradise.
On a day it happed that S. Gregory sang mass in the church of S. Mary major, and when he had said: Pax domini sit semper vobiscum, anon the angel said: Et cum spiritu tuo, and from then forthon the pope ordained a station in that church every year on Easter day, and when then he said in his mass: Pax domini, etc., none shall answer, in remembrance of this miracle.
In the time that Trajan the emperor reigned, and on a time as he went toward a battle out of Rome, it happed that in his way as he should ride, a woman, a widow, came to him weeping and said I pray you, sire, that you avenge the death of one my son which innocently and without cause has been slain. The emperor answered: If I come again from the battle whole and sound then I shall do justice for the death of your son. Then said the widow: Sire, and if you die in the battle who shall then avenge his death? And the emperor said: He that shall come after me. And the widow said: Is it not better that you do to me justice and have the merit thereof of God than another have it for you? Then had Trajan pity and descended from his horse and did justice in avenging the death of her son. On a time S. Gregory went by the market of Rome which is called the market of Trajan, and then he remembered of the justice and other good deeds of Trajan, and how he had been piteous and debonair, and was much sorrowful that he had been a paynim, and he turned to the church of S. Peter wailing for the horror of the miscreance of Trajan. Then answered a voice from God saying: I have now heard your prayer, and have spared Trajan from the pain perpetual. By this, as some say, the pain perpetual due to Trajan as a miscreant was somedeal taken away, but for all that was not he quit from the prison of hell, for the soul may well be in hell and feel there no pain by the mercy of God. And after, it is said that the angel in his answer said more to thus: Because you have prayed for a paynim, God grants you to choose of two things, that one which you will, or you shall be two days in purgatory in pain, or else all the days of your life you shall languish in sickness. Then answered S. Gregory that he had liefer to have sickness all his life in this world, than to feel by two days the pains of purgatory. And ever after he had continually the fevers, or axes, or the gout in his feet, and hereof himself makes mention in one his epistle, and says: I am so much tormented of the gout in my feet, and of other sicknesses that, my life is to me a great pain, every day meseems that I ought to die, and always I abide the death. Some time my pain is little, and some time right great, but it is not so little that it departs from me, ne so great that it brings me to death, and thus it is that I, that am always ready to die, am withdrawn from death. lt happed that a widow that was wont every Sunday to bring hosts to sing mass with, should on a time be houseled and communed, and when S. Gregory should give to her the holy sacrament in saying: Corpus domini nostri, etc., that is to say: The body of our Lord Jesu Christ keep you into everlasting life, anon this woman began to smile tofore S. Gregory, and anon he withdrew his hand, and remised the sacrament upon the altar. And he demanded her, tofore the people, why she smiled, and she said: Because that the bread that I have made with my proper hands you name it the body of our Lord Jesu Christ. Anon S. Gregory put himself to prayer with the people, for to pray to God that hereupon he would show his grace for to confirm our belief, and when they were risen from prayer, S. Gregory saw the holy sacrament in figure of a piece of flesh as great as the little finger of an hand, and anon after, by the prayers of S. Gregory, the flesh of the sacrament turned into semblance of bread as it had been tofore, and therewith he communed and houseled the woman, which after was more religious, and the people more firm in the faith.
S. Gregory made and ordained the song of the office of holy church, and established at Rome two schools of song, that one beside the church of S. Peter, and that other by the church of S. John Lateran, where the place is yet, where he lay and taught the scholars, and the rod with which he menaced them, and the antiphoner on which he learned them is yet there. He put to the canon of the mass these words: Diesque nostros in tua pace disponas, atque ab æ terna damnatione nos eripi, et in electorum tuorum jubeas grege numerari. At the last when S. Gregory had been pope thirteen years, six months and ten days, he being full of good works, departed out of this world in the year of our Lord six hundred and six years, in the time when Phocas was emperor of Rome. Let us then pray to S. Gregory that he get us grace that we may amend so ourselves here in this life that we may come unto everlasting life in heaven. Amen.
One tension in his record should not be resolved for the reader. Gregory wrote roughly twenty letters on Jewish affairs. His letter of 598 to the bishop of Palermo opens with the formula Sicut Judaeis, holding that Jews should be granted no more than Roman law allowed them and that Christians must not infringe what the law did allow; that phrase became the template of papal protective bulls for centuries. In June 591 he rebuked Bishops Virgil of Arles and Theodore of Marseille for forcing baptisms, insisting that conversion come by meekness and kindness rather than by dread, and he repeatedly ordered damaged or seized synagogues restored. In the same lifetime his sermons use the hostile commonplaces of his age, he did not object to material inducements to conversion, and he maintained restrictions such as barring Jewish ownership of Christian slaves. Both records are his, and both are dated.
British (Received Pronunciation): Pastoralis /ˌpæstəˈrɑːlɪs/; Augustine /ɔːˈɡʌstɪn/
Readings for a Teacher of the Faith
Proverbs 3:13–26Psalm 119:89–1061 John 1:1–10Matthew 13:47–52
Almighty God, you gave your servant Gregory the Great special gifts of grace to understand and teach the truth revealed in Christ Jesus: Grant that by this teaching we may know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.