Saint Silvia

Saint Silvia, also known as Saint Sylvia, was a Christian matron of sixth-century Italy, remembered above all as the mother of Pope Gregory I, commonly called Gregory the Great. Later tradition is divided on her birthplace: some accounts make her a native of Sicily, others of Rome. She married Gordianus, a Roman of senatorial standing who held the civil office of regionarius. The couple lived in a large house on the Caelian Hill in Rome. That residence later became the monastery of Saint Andrew, which their son Gregory founded after he had sold his properties and embraced the monastic life.

Silvia and Gordianus had at least one son, Gregory, who was born in Rome around the middle of the sixth century and who would become prefect of the city, then a monk, and finally bishop of Rome from 590 until 604. Gordianus’s sisters Tarsilla and Emiliana lived as consecrated virgins and were themselves later honored as saints, which indicates the strongly religious character of the wider family. After the death of her husband, Silvia gave herself to prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. Hagiographical tradition describes her as living in retirement, sometimes associated with a small oratory, and as continuing to care for Gregory during his years as a monk. A frequently repeated story relates that she sent him vegetables each day on a silver platter, which he in turn distributed to the poor.

According to the conventional chronology, Silvia was still alive when Gregory was elected pope in 590 and died in Rome a short time later, traditionally around 592. No contemporary document records the exact day or year of her death. Her memory was preserved in the Roman Church in close connection with that of her son. Gregory is said to have kept painted portraits of his parents in the monastery on the Caelian Hill. In the early modern period an oratory dedicated to Saint Silvia was built beside the church of San Gregorio Magno al Celio. She appears in the Roman Martyrology, and her feast is observed on 3 November. She belongs to the large number of early saints who were never formally canonized by a pope according to the later juridical process; her cult is of the ancient, popular, and liturgical kind.

Almost nothing about Silvia can be established from sources written in her own lifetime. The main early notices depend on the family background given in accounts of Gregory the Great and on the ninth-century Life of Gregory by John the Deacon, who used Roman archival and oral tradition. Medieval and later hagiographers elaborated her portrait as a model widow and as the mother who helped form a pope and doctor of the Church. Modern historians therefore treat the commonly cited dates of about 515 for her birth and about 592 for her death as later estimates rather than as documented facts. What remains reasonably secure is that she was a well-born Roman wife and mother, the spouse of Gordianus, the mother of Gregory the Great, and a woman whose piety the Latin Church has commemorated as saintly since the early Middle Ages.