SAINT GREGORY THE GREAT
Gregory’s youth was a sad one. All of his boyhood Rome was under siege by one barbarian conqueror after another. Within a period of twenty years Rome was taken and retaken six times. Roman senators and people of Rome were massacred.
He entered Saint Andrew’s Monastery. After his third year at Saint Andrew’s Pope Benedict I made him one of the seven deacons of Rome. Later, Pope Pelagius II sent Deacon Gregory the Byzantine court, at Constantinople as his permanent ambassador. Saint Gregory remained at Constantinople for six years.
Saint Gregory was recalled to Rome in 586 and returned to his monastery, to be acclaimed its abbot. He found Rome again beset with calamities. In his absence the spirit of the world had crept into his monastery. He discovered a general relaxing of the holy detachment from the goods of the world which had been a pledge, in the early days, of the continued holiness of Saint Andrew’s.
Saint Gregory’s letters of which we have eight hundred and fifty preserved for us in fourteen books gives the best possible account of his thoughts. He poured his heart out to Saint Leander on the subject of his leaving his monastery.
The story is told that as Saint Gregory was passing over the bridge of Saint Peter’s, a heavenly vision consoled the long line of the faithful. The Archangel Saint Michael was seen over the tomb of the Emperor Hadrian, sheathing his flaming sword in token that the pestilence was over. And at the same moment, Saint Gregory heard angelic voices singing the antiphon, “Queen of Heaven, rejoice!” The great monk made answer, “Pray for us to the Lord, alleluia.” To this day, the tomb of Hadrian in Rome is called the Castle of Sant’ Angelo, in memory of the visitation of Saint Michael and his angelic chorusters, and of the miraculous deliverance of the city from plague. A marble angel was placed on the tomb and remained there for centuries until Pope Benedict XIV replaced it with a bronze one.
The custom of saying “God bless you” when someone has sneezed, and the making of the Sign of the Cross on the mouths of those who yawn, goes back to the days of Saint
Gregory and the Roman plague. The dread disease always ended in a spasm of sneezing or yawning, and the holy Pontiff ordered that “God bless you” should be said to those who sneeze, and the blessing of the Sign of the Cross should be put on the mouths of those who yawned.
Gregory called himself the “servant of the servants of God,” in rebuke to the
grasping Patriarch’s appropriation of the title of ecumenical, for he knew that John was using ecumenical in the sense of universal, in another attempt to take for the Bishop of Constantinople the perogatives of the Bishop of Rome, the universal Father of Christendom. And when John’s friends tried to justify him and accused Pope Gregory of making too much of a “mere question of words,” the Pope answered them: “A mere affair of a title, a simple question of words! That is easily said! When Antichrist calls himself God, then dare to say: A mere affair of a title, a simple question of words!”
“For all who know the Gospel,” he wrote the Emperor Maurice, “it is common knowledge that the charge of the whole Church was entrusted by the voice of the Lord to the holy Apostle Peter, chief of all the Apostles. Peter received the keys of the kingdom of Heaven, the power of binding and loosing, the charge of the whole Church, the Principate over it; yet he is not called the universal Apostle; and John as bishop endeavors to be called universal bishop!
“All things in Europe are delivered over to the power of barbarians. Our cities are destroyed, our fortresses overthrown, our provinces depopulated. The ground remains untilled. Day by day idolterers exercise their rage upon the faithful, who are cruelly slaughtered; and bishops who should lie in dust and ashes seek for themselves vain names: glory in new and profane titles.
“We know indeed that many bishops of Constantinople have fallen into the gulf of
heresy; have become not only heretics but heresiarchs. Thence came Nestorius, who, deeming
Jesus Christ, the Mediator of God and man, to be two persons, because he did not believe
that God could become man, went even to the extent of Jewish unbelief. Thence came
Macedonius, who denied the Godhead of the Holy Spirit, consubstantial with the Father and
the Son.
“For I am the servant of all bishops so long as they live like bishops. But whoever, through vain glory and contrary to the statutes of the Fathers lifts his neck against Almighty God, I trust in Almighty God that he will not bend me even with the sword.”
Saint Gregory was the first monk to become Pope. He had feared that in the life of the papal court his monastic spirit might be lost. Years before, in Constantinople he had acquired the holy art of doing two things at once, of giving his mind to the work at hand and of keeping his heart at the same time fixed upon his Lord.
On the first of each month, and on the holydays in between, the Pope would assist and
oversee the distribution of meat, fish, vegetables, wheat, corn, oil, cheese, wine and clothing. He forced from the vast papal lands, acquired over the centuries by the donations of the faithful,
every morsel of food and every bit of wood which could possibly be gathered together to provide for the needs of his impoverished people. He raised up a great army of workers whom he called “soldiers of Saint Peter,” whose main duty, along with administering the papal land, was to assist the poor and place homeless families on farms, which were leased to them for three generations.
Saint Gregory admonished his rectors that the papal patrimonies were the goods of the
poor, that the thing most to be sought after was not gold, but eternal justice, and that the treasure of the Church was not to be used for selfish ends. By his boundless charities and the extraordinary burden put upon them, he finally emptied his treasury.
Pope Gregory’s constant care was for his bishops and priests. Early in his pontificate, he published his Pastoral Rule, on the duties of a bishop. This celebrated book, which for centuries remained the textbook of the clerical life, he divided into four parts. The first part treats of the fact that only one who already is skilled as a physician of the soul is fitted to undertake the supreme task of bishop. The second part describes the ordering of a bishop’s life to the end that he might be a good pastor. The third part sets down rules for the teaching and admonishing by the bishop of those under him. And the fourth part tells the bishop that, in spite of the good works he may have done, he must ever bear in mind his own weakness, since the better his work the greater his danger of falling through self-confidence.
In 593, Saint Gregory wrote the four books of Dialogues, which, together with the Pastoral Rule, were the two works most universally read and prized throughout the Middle Ages. The Dialogues provide an excellent history of the times. The second of its books is given over entirely to a wonderful life of Saint Benedict, while the other three books contain, in many cases, the only accounts we have of the virtuous lives and the deeds of extraordinary holiness of the courageous and suffering Catholics of those days.
The chief concern of the great Pontiff, throughout the fourteen years of his pontificate, was that not only should his people receive the Faith, but that they should progress in it. He demanded that his priests be learned as well as holy. “If you require such learning of priests,” a bishop once wrote him, “we shall never find any candidates!” But the Pope would not be deterred. He not only made learning a requirement, he himself set the example. It came to be said of him that “he possessed doctrine, learning and eloquence superior to those of the time in which he lived. He had not a single servant who had not received a good education, and whose words were not worthy to be heard around the ancient throne of the Latin language.”
Saint Gregory was the first Pope to use the phrase, “to speak ex cathedra.” He reorganized the “stations,” still mentioned in the Roman Missal, especially in the Lenten Masses. It was then the custom for a part of the clergy to walk with the people in procession to whatever church was the “station” for the day, and there together they would hear Mass. The Pope would preside at the Mass, and, on most occasions, he would preach. Saint Gregory preached as often as his failing voice would let him.
Saint Gregory managed to compile a volume of the prayers, or collects, said in the Mass, and this he called the Sacramentary.
There has been a revival also in our day of the beautifully reverent “Gregorian
Chant,” named in honor of Saint Gregory’s patient labor in restoring the ancient chant of the Church and in setting down the rules to be followed so that Church music might more perfectly fulfill its function. Pope Gregory held that the place of Church music was a subordinate one. It should never provide anything more than a background for the sacred reenactment of Calvary. It should never draw attention to itself, and away from the Holy sacrifice of the Mass. It should, while disposing the minds of the faithful to profound reverence of God, and making more ardent the love of their hearts for Him, never become an end in itself.
Saint Gregory the Great died on the 12th of March, 604, at the age of 64. He was canonized immediately after his death. The Church gratefully placed him beside Jerome and Ambrose and Augustine. Saint Gregory the Great became the fourth of the Church’s four great Doctors of the West.
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