ST. GREGORY THE GREAT, POPE AND DOCTOR OF THE CHURCH
Photo taken from Amy Welborn's Open Book
Impossible not to take note of the Saint of the day, Gregory the Great. The Holy Father's Angelus message today was, of course, about him, and it bears re-reading here:
The Roman calendar remembers today, September 3, St. Gregory the Great, Pope and Doctor of the Church (ca 540-604). His singular figure - I would say almost unique - is an example to point to, both to Pastors of the Church as well as to public administrators. In fact he was first Prefect and then Bishop of Rome.
As an imperial functionary, he distinguished himself for his administrative ability and moral integrity, so that at 30 years of age, he reached the highest civil office of the city as Prefect.
But the vocation for monastic life matured in him, and he finally embraced it in 574 at the death of his father. From that time, the Benedictine Rule became the defining structure of his life.
Even when he was sent by the Pope as his representative to the Emperor of the East, he maintained his monastic lifestyle, simple and poor.
Called back to Rome, he lived in a monastery but became a close collaborator of Pope Pelagius II, and when the latter died, victim of the plague, Gregory was acclaimed by everyone as his successor. He sought in every way to avoid this nomination, but in the end he had to give in, and, leaving the cloister with a heavy heart, he dedicated himself to the community of the Church, knowing he was fulfilling an obligation and that he was a simple "servant of the servants of God."
"He who understands that he must lead others by the decree of divine will but looks down on this pre-eminence is not truly humble," he wrote. "But if instead he submits to the divine disposition, gives up the vice of obstinacy, and has the gifts with which he could help others, when the supreme office of governing souls is imposed on him, he may flee from it in his heart, but he ought to obey even if it is against his will." (Pastoral rule, I, 6).
With prophetic foresight, Gregory sensed that a new civilization was arising from the encounter between the Roman legacy and the so-called barbarians, thanks to the cohesive force and moral superiority of Christianity. Monasticism showed itself to be a treasure not only for the Church but for the entire society.
Of questionable health but of strong moral fiber, St. Gregory the Great carried out intense pastoral and civic activity. He left a vast epistolary, adamirable homilies, a celebrated commentary on the Book of Job, and writings on the life of St. Benedict, in addition to numerous liturgical texts, especially for the reform of chanting which became known as Gregorian from his name.
But his most celebrated work is the Pastoral Rule, which had for priests the same importance that St. Benedict's Rule had for the monks of the Middle Ages.
"The life of a pastor of souls should be a balanced synthesis of contemplation and action, animated by the love which "reachest its highest peaks when one bends mercifully towards the profound troubles of others. The ability to bend down to the miseries of others is a measure of the force of one's striving upwards" (II, 5), he wrote.
This teaching, which is always applicable, inspired the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council to define the image of the Pastor in our days.
Let us pray to the Holy Virgin Mary that the example and teachings of St. Gregory the Great may be followed by the Pastors of the Church and even by responsible authorities in civil institutions.
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Yesterday, Benefan posted an article by a noted Catholic writer about Gregory the Great. Most of it is excerpted here:
September 2, 2006
Robert P. Imbelli
Commonweal Magazine
For the past five years, on trips to Rome, I have been blessed by being able to stay in a friend's apartment on the Caelian Hill, rising to the East of the Colosseum...
But for me personally, the strongest spiritual resonance of the Caelian Hill is that here the future Pope Gregory founded a monastery on his family estates, today commemorated by the imposing church of San Gregorio Magno on the Caelian's Southwest slope.
Called from monastic seclusion, Gregory served as papal representative to the Emperor in Constantinople. Elected Pope himself, he labored to meet the temporal and spiritual needs of his people, not only in Rome, but throughout Italy.
He, of course, sent Augustine and companions from his monastery on the Caelian to England, thereby establishing the close links between Rome and Canterbury that remain a point of commonality in Roman Catholic and Anglican relations. Summing up his treatment of Gregory in
Saints & Sinners: A History of the Popes, Eamon Duffy writes:
"Gregory was unquestionably the greatest Pope of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, and arguably the greatest Pope ever. His memory was venerated in the Anglo-Saxon world and the churches with whom the Anglo-Saxons had contact, as 'the teacher of the English,' 'our Gregory.' A tenth century Irish life of the Pope even claimed him as a Kerry-man, who had taught most of the Irish saints.
But, in many respects, Gregory was the teacher of the entire Middle Ages, a bridge between the classical world and the emerging Medieval culture. The mystical language Gregory forged provided Christians the vocabulary to articulate their deepest spiritual yearnings. After Augustine and Aristotle, he is the authority most quoted by Aquinas.
In preparation for his feast (September 3rd), I have cultivated the habit of re-reading the splendid study of Gregory that begins the second volume of Bernard McGinn's magnificent opus,
The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism. McGinn concludes his presentation thus:
"It is easy to see why it is possible to think of Gregory the Great not only as the 'Doctor of Desire,' but also as the 'Doctor of the Mixed Life.'... [For Gregory] the monastic life is the figure of what humanity in Adam was originally created to enjoy: oneness of contemplative attention to God.
"But if the monk is the living image of humanity's original condition, even monks no longer live in paradise. Though monks exist to remind us of what once was, and better yet, what is to come in heaven, in the present world, whose fallenness Gregory the Great felt so keenly,
it is the preacher, living out his perilous vocation to keep both his eye on the goal and his heart with suffering humanity, who is the truest mystic -- the contemplative in action, like the great pope himself."
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I would have liked to research one of St. Gregory's homilies, and I will, time permitting. Meanwhile, how many preachers today could come up to Mr. McGinn's standards?
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 04/09/2006 2.44]