Saint Gregory the Great

St. Gregory was born at Rome into an ancient senatorial family that had long been Christian. The family house stood on the Caelian Hill, on the street called Clivus Scauri. Three of his aunts kept consecrated virginity together in that house.

On December 17, 546 AD four Isaurian soldiers betrayed Rome to the besieging Goths. Dudden judges the boy old enough to feel and remember the horrors of that siege. Dudden places his return to the city in 549 AD, among the relics of a decaying Rome.

At fourteen St. Gregory began his public education in grammar, rhetoric and dialectic. St. Gregory of Tours recorded that in those arts he was thought second to none in Rome. He went on to the civil law and to the canons of the Church.

Before he was thirty-three the Emperor Justin II made him Prefect of the City. The civil administration inside the walls rested in his hands, and he bought and distributed grain with the pope and worked with the Magister Militum to defend the city. As chief judge he wore the trabea, a silk robe embroidered and set with precious stones.

His father died, and the Caelian palace and most of the family wealth came to St. Gregory. He left every civil office and made the house into the monastery of Saint Andrew. Six more monasteries were built out of the Sicilian estates, and the rest went to the poor.

His fasts were so severe that they injured his health for the rest of his life. Saint Silvia, his mother, sent him raw vegetables and fruit on a silver dish from her retreat. Dudden records that St. Gregory always counted those three years the happiest of his life.

The pope ordained St. Gregory one of the seven deacons of Rome, against his will. Early in 579 AD he left for Constantinople as apocrisiarius, the papal envoy at the imperial court. His commission was to obtain troops against the Lombards.

He stood godfather to the eldest son of the Emperor Maurice. At Constantinople he composed his Morals on the Book of Job for the monks who had followed him. He came home to the Caelian about 585 AD without soldiers.

In November 589 AD the Tiber overwhelmed Rome and destroyed the granaries of the Church. The plague followed, and in January it killed Pope Pelagius II. St. Gregory climbed the ambo of St John Lateran and preached to the dying city.

A seventh-century Roman tradition holds that seven trains of penitents crossed Rome, marchers falling dead of the plague as they went. The whole people elected the deacon St. Gregory, and he was consecrated Bishop of Rome on September 3, 590 AD.

In the summer of 592 AD Ariulf of Spoleto sent a threatening letter and came before the walls. St. Gregory concluded a truce with the duke that July, and the Church bore the cost. King Agilulf marched on Rome in June 593 AD, and no relief came from Ravenna.

In June 595 AD a letter from the Emperor Maurice reached him, accusing him of treachery and folly. The negotiations ended in a truce in 598 AD, and the articles of peace were signed the next year.

According to the tradition St. Bede handed on from his ancestors, St. Gregory saw youths from Britain offered for sale at Rome. Tradition holds that he then asked the pope to send preachers to the English and offered himself for the work.

In 596 AD he sent Saint Augustine and a company of monks to preach to the English. He wrote to the monks on the road when their nerve failed. St. Augustine ordained two bishops in Britain in 604 AD.

In 599 AD St. Gregory wrote that for eleven months he had rarely been able to leave his bed. The letters, homilies and negotiations of those years were dictated from a sickbed.

On January 25, 604 AD he gave lands to the church of St Paul to furnish it with lights. Shortly before the end he sent Queen Theodelinda wood of the true cross for her baptized son. He died at Rome on March 12, 604 AD, and was buried that day in the portico of St Peter's.