Pope Gregory

Pope Gregory I, known to history as Gregory the Great, was born in Rome around 540 into a prominent senatorial family of considerable wealth and Christian piety. His father Gordianus held civil office in the city, and his mother Silvia was later venerated as a saint, as were two of his paternal aunts. Gregory received the education of a Roman aristocrat, including training in law and rhetoric, and as a young man he pursued a public career that culminated in his appointment as prefect of Rome, the highest civil magistracy remaining in the city, around 573. The Italy of his youth was a land of political fragmentation and hardship: the Gothic War had devastated the peninsula, the Lombards were soon to invade, and imperial authority from Constantinople was distant and often ineffective.

After the death of his father, Gregory experienced a profound conversion of life. He sold or dedicated much of his inheritance to religious purposes, transforming the family residence on the Caelian Hill into a monastery dedicated to Saint Andrew, and establishing six further monasteries on ancestral estates in Sicily. He himself entered the monastic community he had founded and lived under a rule of prayer, fasting, and study. This contemplative interlude was interrupted when Pope Pelagius II ordained him a deacon and dispatched him as papal apocrisiarius to the court of the emperor in Constantinople. There Gregory spent several years, deepening his knowledge of Eastern church life and beginning his extensive commentary on the Book of Job, later known as the Moralia. Recalled to Rome, he resumed the abbacy of Saint Andrew's until, in 590, during a severe outbreak of plague that killed Pelagius II, the clergy and people of Rome elected him bishop of the city. He accepted the office only with great reluctance.

Gregory's fourteen-year pontificate unfolded against famine, epidemic, and the continuing Lombard threat. He organized systematic relief for the poor and refugees of Rome, administered the papal patrimonies in Italy, Sicily, Gaul, and elsewhere with unusual administrative rigor, and in practice assumed many of the civil responsibilities that the imperial government could no longer discharge. He negotiated with Lombard leaders, including King Agilulf and the Catholic queen Theodelinda, seeking both peace for Italy and the conversion of the Lombards from Arianism. In 596 he sent the prior of his own monastery, Augustine, with a band of monks to preach the Gospel to the Anglo-Saxons of Britain; the mission, which established the see of Canterbury, became one of the defining achievements of his reign and of early medieval evangelization. Gregory also intervened in the affairs of churches in Gaul, Spain, Africa, and the East, asserting a Petrine primacy while remaining formally a subject of the Byzantine emperor.

A prolific writer, Gregory left a body of work that shaped Latin Christianity for centuries. The Pastoral Rule offered a handbook of episcopal spirituality and governance that was translated into Greek in his lifetime and later into English at the court of King Alfred. The Dialogues, a collection of Italian saints' lives, preserved the memory of Saint Benedict of Nursia and popularized monastic ideals. His homilies on the Gospels and on Ezekiel, together with more than eight hundred surviving letters, reveal a pastor attentive to liturgy, doctrine, clerical discipline, and the daily needs of his flock. Although the corpus of so-called Gregorian chant cannot be attributed to him in any simple sense, his name became inseparably linked with the Roman liturgical tradition. Gregory died in Rome on 12 March 604 and was buried in Saint Peter's Basilica. Venerated as a saint from the time of his death, he was later numbered among the four great Doctors of the Latin Church. In the Roman Catholic Church his principal feast is kept on 3 September; many Eastern churches commemorate him on 12 March.