Pope Gregory

Pope Gregory I, known as Gregory the Great, was a Roman aristocrat of the mid-sixth century who became one of the most consequential bishops of Rome in late antiquity and was later numbered among the Latin Doctors of the Church. He was born in Rome around the middle of the sixth century into a wealthy senatorial family. His father Gordianus held civic office; his mother Silvia came to be venerated as a saint; and an ancestor, Pope Felix III, had occupied the papal see in the fifth century. Gregory received the legal and rhetorical education customary for his class and entered public life. By about 573 he held the prefecture of the City of Rome, the chief civil magistracy, at a time when imperial authority in Italy was fragile and the peninsula was still recovering from the Gothic Wars and related devastation.

After his father's death he devoted his inheritance to religious foundations, converting the family mansion on the Caelian Hill into a monastery dedicated to Saint Andrew and establishing further monasteries on Sicilian estates. He himself took up the monastic life under a discipline closely associated with the Rule of Saint Benedict. Around 579 Pope Pelagius II sent him as apocrisiarius, or papal representative, to the imperial court at Constantinople, where he remained for some six years. There he defended Roman interests, took part in theological discussion, and began the long commentary on Job later known as the Moralia. He returned to Rome and to his monastery until Pelagius II died in 590 during a severe outbreak of plague. Clergy and people elected Gregory pope. Contemporary reports stress his reluctance and his attempts to evade consecration before he accepted the office.

His pontificate, from 590 to 604, coincided with Lombard pressure on Italy, famine, epidemic, and the retreat of effective Byzantine civil power. Gregory organized large-scale relief for the poor and for refugees, drawing on the papal patrimonies in Italy, Sicily, and elsewhere, which he administered with close attention to accounts and personnel. He negotiated with Lombard rulers, including King Agilulf and Queen Theodelinda, both to protect Rome and to encourage the movement of the Lombards away from Arianism. In dealings with Constantinople he insisted on the rights of the Roman see and objected to the patriarch of Constantinople's use of the style Ecumenical Patriarch. In 596 he sent Augustine, prior of the Caelian monastery, with a group of monks to preach among the Anglo-Saxons; the mission reached Kent in 597 and became the starting point of the organized English Church and of enduring links between Britain and Rome. More than eight hundred surviving letters document these policies and the routine government of the Roman Church.

Gregory's writings shaped medieval pastoral practice, spirituality, and hagiography. The Pastoral Rule described the inner life and public duties of bishops and remained a standard clerical handbook for centuries. The Dialogues gathered Italian miracle stories and included a life of Saint Benedict that became a chief source for Benedictine memory. Homilies on the Gospels and on Ezekiel, together with the Moralia, circulated widely in the Latin West. Medieval tradition credited him with organizing the Roman schola cantorum and with a decisive role in the Roman liturgy, although the later repertory called Gregorian chant is not his personal composition in the form in which it is now known. He died in Rome on 12 March 604 and was buried in Saint Peter's Basilica. Veneration began immediately; there was no later formal process of canonization of the medieval type. In the present General Roman Calendar his feast is kept on 3 September, the traditional anniversary of his death on 12 March having fallen in Lent. He is invoked as patron of musicians, singers, teachers, students, England, and the papacy, and is associated with deliverance from plague.