Pope Gregory

Pope Gregory I, known to later ages as Gregory the Great, was born in Rome in the sixth century into a wealthy senatorial family noted for public office and for piety. His father Gordianus held civic rank in the city; his mother Silvia came to be venerated as a saint, as did two of Gregory’s aunts who lived as consecrated virgins. He received the legal and rhetorical education expected of a Roman aristocrat and, in the early 570s, served as Prefect of the City of Rome, the chief civil magistracy. After his father’s death he withdrew from secular office, turned the family house on the Caelian Hill into a monastery dedicated to Saint Andrew, and founded further monasteries on ancestral lands in Sicily, giving away much of his inheritance to the poor.

Gregory himself entered the Caelian community and lived under a monastic rule in the tradition associated with Saint Benedict. About 579 Pope Pelagius II sent him as apocrisiarius, or papal representative, to the imperial court at Constantinople, where he remained for some six years. In the East he began his long commentary on the Book of Job, later called the Moralia, and took part in theological debate, including a dispute with Patriarch Eutychius over the nature of the risen body. He then returned to Rome and to the abbacy of Saint Andrew’s. When Pelagius II died in 590 during a severe outbreak of plague, clergy and people elected Gregory bishop of Rome. Contemporary accounts stress his reluctance to accept the office.

As pope he governed a city and an Italian peninsula stricken by famine, epidemic, and Lombard warfare, at a time when effective help from the imperial government in Constantinople was limited. He organized relief for the poor from the revenues of the papal patrimonies, negotiated with Lombard leaders to spare Rome, and exercised a practical leadership in civil as well as ecclesiastical affairs. In 596 he sent the monk Augustine, prior of Saint Andrew’s, with companions to the Kingdom of Kent. That mission led to the baptism of King Æthelberht and the founding of the see of Canterbury, a turning point in the conversion of the English. Gregory also concerned himself with liturgical order and the formation of clergy. Later tradition attached his name to the repertory of plainchant called Gregorian; historians treat that personal attribution with caution, while not denying his broader influence on Roman liturgical practice.

His writings became standard texts of the medieval Latin Church. The Pastoral Rule is a handbook on the character and duties of bishops; the Dialogues, composed in the early 590s, gather Italian hagiographical stories and contain the principal early life of Saint Benedict; homilies on the Gospels and on Ezekiel, together with a large surviving correspondence, display both pastoral care and a strong sense of the Roman see’s responsibility. Gregory died in Rome on 12 March 604 and was buried in Saint Peter’s Basilica. He was honoured as a saint by popular cult from the outset and is counted among the four great Doctors of the Latin Church. In the present General Roman Calendar his feast is kept on 3 September; many Eastern churches and older Western calendars commemorate him on 12 March.