Pope Gregory

Pope Gregory I, known to history as Gregory the Great, was a sixth-century Roman churchman who served as Bishop of Rome from 590 until his death in 604. He was born in Rome in the mid-sixth century into a prominent senatorial family of considerable wealth and Christian piety. His father Gordianus held civic office, and his mother Silvia later came to be venerated as a saint. The family counted Pope Felix III among its ancestors. Gregory received the education customary for a young aristocrat of his rank, including training in law and public administration, and in the 570s he held the prestigious post of prefect of the city of Rome, the highest civil authority in the city at that time.

After the death of his father, Gregory used his inheritance to found seven monasteries, six on family estates in Sicily and one in his own palatial house on the Caelian Hill in Rome, which he dedicated to Saint Andrew and entered as a monk. He lived under a monastic rule associated with the tradition of Saint Benedict. Around 579 Pope Pelagius II appointed him papal representative, or apocrisiarius, at the imperial court in Constantinople, where he remained for several years and became involved in theological controversy, notably over the nature of the resurrection body. Recalled to Rome, he served as abbot of Saint Andrew's until, during a severe outbreak of plague in 590, the clergy and people of Rome elected him pope. He accepted the office only with reluctance and was consecrated in September of that year.

As pope, Gregory faced famine, epidemic, and the military pressure of the Lombards in Italy. He organized large-scale charitable distributions from the estates of the Roman Church, negotiated truces with Lombard leaders, and asserted a practical leadership in Italy at a time when imperial authority from Constantinople was weak. In 596 he dispatched the monk Augustine, later first Archbishop of Canterbury, with a party of missionaries to the Kingdom of Kent, an initiative that established the Roman mission to the Anglo-Saxons and is among the most famous acts of his pontificate. Gregory's surviving correspondence, numbering more than eight hundred letters, documents his close attention to episcopal appointments, monastic discipline, the administration of church lands, and relations with the churches of Gaul, Spain, Africa, and the East. He promoted the title servus servorum Dei, servant of the servants of God.

Gregory was a prolific spiritual writer. His Pastoral Rule became a standard handbook for bishops in the Latin West. The Dialogues, written in the early 590s, recount Italian saints' lives, including the most influential early biography of Saint Benedict of Nursia. His Moralia in Job is a vast moral and allegorical commentary, and he left collections of homilies on the Gospels and on Ezekiel. Later tradition associated him with the organization of the Roman liturgy and with the body of plainchant that came to bear his name, though modern scholarship treats the extent of his personal role in musical reform as uncertain. He died in Rome in March 604 and was buried at Saint Peter's. Veneration of Gregory as a saint began immediately; he was later numbered among the four great Latin Doctors of the Church. In the present General Roman Calendar his feast is kept on 3 September, the anniversary of his episcopal consecration; many Eastern calendars and older Western uses commemorate him on 12 March, the day of his death.