Pope St. Gregory the Great

Pope St. Gregory the Great was bishop of Rome from 590 to 604, a Roman aristocrat who became a monk, and one of the four great Latin Doctors of the Church. He fed a starving city during plague and Lombard invasion, sent the mission that converted the English, and wrote the Pastoral Rule, the handbook that shaped how bishops understood their job for the next thousand years. He was the first monk elected pope, and he was the first to sign himself Servus servorum Dei, servant of the servants of God.

Born c. 540, Rome Died 12 March 604 Pope 590 to 604 Doctor of the Church Feast: 3 September

1. Saving Rome

Gregory was born in Rome around 540, into a wealthy senatorial family with a house on the Caelian Hill and estates in Sicily. His father Gordianus held office in the Roman church administration. His mother Silvia is venerated as a saint. He was raised in a city that had been sacked, besieged and depopulated within living memory, and he grew up watching the machinery of Roman government run down for lack of anyone to pay for it.

He entered public life and became Prefect of the City of Rome, the senior civil office of the old order, around 573. Then he gave it up. After his father died he turned the family estates in Sicily into six monasteries, converted the family house on the Caelian into a seventh dedicated to St Andrew, and became a monk in it. He described those years afterwards as the happiest of his life, and he never stopped resenting the work that pulled him out of them.

Pope Pelagius II sent him to Constantinople as apocrisiarius, the papal representative at the imperial court, for roughly six years from about 579. He learned there how imperial politics actually worked and how little practical help Rome could expect from an emperor a thousand miles away preoccupied with Persia and the Balkans. He also, by his own account, never learned Greek well.

Plague reached Rome in 589 and 590, and Pelagius II died of it. The clergy and people of Rome elected Gregory. He tried to refuse, wrote to the emperor asking him to block the election, and was consecrated anyway on 3 September 590.

What followed was fourteen years of administration under emergency conditions. Gregory reorganised the patrimony of St Peter, the scattered church estates in Sicily, Campania and elsewhere, into a working supply system, and used the grain and rent to feed Rome directly. He kept written records of who received what. He repaired the water supply, ransomed captives from the Lombards, staffed hospices, and paid soldiers when the imperial exarch at Ravenna would not.

He also negotiated. The Lombard king Agilulf marched on Rome in 593, and Gregory dealt with him personally and bought the city out of the siege. Constantinople disapproved of a bishop conducting foreign policy. Gregory conducted it anyway, because the alternative was watching the city fall while waiting for permission.

One famous story from the plague of 590 belongs to legend rather than record. Gregory led penitential processions through the city, which is well attested. The account of an angel appearing above Hadrian's mausoleum sheathing a sword to signal the end of the plague, which is said to have given Castel Sant'Angelo its name, appears in much later medieval sources. Treat the processions as history and the angel as devotional tradition.

2. "Not Angles, but Angels"

The story is told by the Venerable Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written around 731, more than a century after Gregory's death. Bede reports it as something handed down among his own people rather than as documented fact. Gregory, still a monk, saw fair-haired boys for sale in the Roman market, asked where they came from, and was told they were Angles. Non Angli, sed angeli, he replied: not Angles, but angels. The pun only works in Latin, which is a fair sign the story was shaped by Latin-speaking storytellers.

The mission is documented. In 596 Gregory sent Augustine, prior of his own monastery of St Andrew on the Caelian, with a company of monks to Kent. They lost their nerve in Gaul and Augustine came back to Rome asking to be released. Gregory sent him out again with a letter telling him to finish what he had begun. They landed in Kent in 597. King Æthelberht, whose Frankish wife Bertha was already a Christian, gave them a hearing and eventually accepted baptism. Augustine became the first Archbishop of Canterbury.

Gregory's instructions to the mission are the most interesting part of the record, and they survive because Bede quoted them. In a letter of 601 carried to England by Abbot Mellitus, Gregory told the missionaries to destroy the idols but to keep the temples, sprinkle them with holy water, set altars in them and let the people go on gathering where they had always gathered. He reasoned that people climb to high places by steps rather than leaps. That instinct, to convert a culture by baptising what is good in it rather than by flattening it, runs through the whole history of Christian mission afterwards.

England kept the debt in view. Bede calls Gregory the apostle of the English, and the English Church honoured him as its own founder long before Rome gave him a universal feast.

3. Gregorian Chant

Gregorian chant carries Gregory's name, and the honest position is that the connection is looser than the name suggests. Gregory did work on the Roman liturgy. He rearranged parts of the Mass, and he is credited with strengthening the schola cantorum, the papal choir school in Rome. Beyond that, the record thins out.

The repertory now called Gregorian chant took its surviving shape in the Frankish lands under Charlemagne and his successors, in the eighth and ninth centuries, as Rome's liturgical music was imported north and reworked. The earliest manuscripts with musical notation date from the ninth century, roughly two hundred and fifty years after Gregory died. The attribution to Gregory, including the familiar image of the dove dictating the melodies into his ear, comes from Carolingian writers who had a strong interest in presenting the new Frankish-Roman chant as ancient papal authority rather than as a recent northern project.

None of that makes the chant less valuable. The music is one of the great inheritances of Western civilisation and the Second Vatican Council named it as proper to the Roman liturgy and gave it pride of place. Gregory's real contribution was the seriousness with which he treated public worship as the work of the whole Church, and the name attached itself to the tradition he stood at the head of.

4. Servant of the Servants of God

Gregory was the first pope to sign himself Servus servorum Dei, servant of the servants of God. Popes still use the title in solemn documents fourteen centuries later.

It had an edge to it. John IV of Constantinople, called the Faster, used the title "ecumenical patriarch," and Gregory read that as a claim to universal jurisdiction that no bishop should make. He objected in a series of letters, and he answered a grand title with a lowly one. His argument rested on the Gospel: the Lord told the disciples that whoever wished to be great among them must be their servant, and whoever wished to be first must be the slave of all (Mk 10:43-44), and that he himself came to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many (Mk 10:45).

Gregory's own view of church authority followed from that. The office existed to carry burdens. He wrote constantly to bishops across the West and to the imperial court, and the register of his letters, of which more than eight hundred survive, is one of the best sources we have for how any part of the sixth-century world was actually governed.

5. The Pastoral Rule

Gregory wrote the Liber Regulae Pastoralis, the Book of the Pastoral Rule, early in his pontificate, partly to explain why he had tried to avoid the office. It opens with a line that fixed the subject for later centuries: the government of souls is the art of arts.

The book has four parts. The first asks who should take pastoral office and who should stay away from it. The second describes the life a pastor has to live if his preaching is to mean anything. The third, the longest by far, is a set of paired cases showing how the same truth has to be spoken differently to different people: to the joyful and the sad, the poor and the rich, the meek and the hot-tempered, those who sin from weakness and those who sin from deliberation. The fourth is short and tells the preacher to remember his own weakness after he has finished preaching well.

Its influence is measurable. It was translated into Greek in Gregory's lifetime, and King Alfred the Great had it translated into Old English in the ninth century as one of the books he thought every English bishop needed. Frankish councils required bishops to own a copy. It remains the most useful thing ever written about the difference between saying something true and saying it to the person in front of you.

6. The Dialogues and the Life of St Benedict

The Dialogues are four books of accounts of holy men in Italy, cast as a conversation between Gregory and a deacon named Peter. Book Two is entirely about St Benedict of Nursia, and it is essentially the only ancient source we have for Benedict's life. Everything commonly said about Benedict, the cave at Subiaco, the monks who tried to poison him, the founding of Monte Cassino, the last meeting with his sister Scholastica, comes through Gregory.

That makes the Dialogues historically load-bearing and worth reading with care. Gregory wrote them to edify, and the miracle stories are told in a hagiographic register rather than a documentary one. He names his informants, which was good practice for the period, and he was writing within living memory of Benedict's death. A reader should hold the shape of the life as reliable and the individual wonders as devotional narrative, and not pretend the two are the same kind of claim.

Book Four discusses the state of souls after death, purification, and the value of offering the Eucharist for the dead. The custom of Gregorian Masses, thirty Masses on consecutive days for one deceased person, traces back to a story told there.

7. The Moralia and How Gregory Read Scripture

The Moralia in Job began as talks Gregory gave to his monastic companions in Constantinople and grew into a commentary of thirty-five books on the Book of Job. It is the largest thing he wrote and the fullest surviving example of how a Latin churchman of the period read the Bible.

Gregory worked at three levels in turn: what the text says as history, what it teaches about Christ and the Church, and what it demands of the reader's own conduct. The third level is where he spends most of his energy, which is why the book is called the Moralia. He also preached forty homilies on the Gospels and a set on Ezekiel, the latter delivered while the Lombards were closing on Rome. He breaks off partway through the Ezekiel homilies and tells the congregation that he cannot go on expounding a prophet while the city is under attack, and the passage is one of the most human moments in patristic literature.

8. Doctor of the Church

Gregory is one of the four great Latin Doctors of the Church, with St Ambrose, St Augustine and St Jerome. Pope Boniface VIII formally recognised the four in 1298. Of the four, Gregory is the practical one: Ambrose the bishop-statesman, Augustine the analyst, Jerome the scholar, and Gregory the man who had to run something.

The Eastern churches honour him too, under the title Gregory the Dialogist, and keep his feast on 12 March, the day he died. The Roman calendar moved his memorial to 3 September, the anniversary of his consecration as pope, so that it would fall outside Lent.

9. Feast Day and Patronage

Gregory's memorial in the general Roman calendar falls on 3 September. Communities that use the older Roman calendar keep 12 March, and the Byzantine churches also keep 12 March.

He is a patron of musicians, singers and choirs, which comes directly from the chant that bears his name, and of teachers and students, which comes from the Pastoral Rule and the homilies. England has honoured him as its apostle since Bede. He is buried in St Peter's Basilica.

Devotion to him is concentrated where his work was: in seminaries, among choirs and scholae, and in the English-speaking Church, which owes its existence as a Latin Christian body to a decision he made about some boys in a market.

10. What a Reader Can Take From Gregory

Three things carry across fourteen hundred years without needing translation.

Do the nearest necessary thing. Gregory did not want the papacy and said so in writing. He took it and then spent fourteen years on grain shipments, aqueduct repair, ransom payments and letters. Holiness in his case looked like administration done honestly under bad conditions.

Speak to the person in front of you. The third book of the Pastoral Rule is a long argument that the same truth has to be delivered differently to a frightened person and a complacent one. Anyone who teaches, parents, manages or evangelises is working in that book's territory.

Convert by grafting, not by burning. The letter to Mellitus told the English mission to keep the buildings, keep the feast days, and change what they were for. That is a policy for how to bring a whole life into the faith rather than demanding that a person discard everything they have known first.

For the wider Catholic understanding of the office Gregory held, see the papacy, and for how the Church honours holy men and women in general, see the saints.

11. Frequently Asked Questions

Why is Gregory called "the Great"?

Gregory is called "the Great" because of what his fourteen-year pontificate accomplished under emergency conditions: he fed Rome during plague and Lombard invasion out of the church estates, negotiated directly with the Lombard king when imperial help failed, sent the mission that converted Anglo-Saxon England, and wrote the Pastoral Rule, which became the standard handbook for bishops in the West. Only two other popes carry the title, Leo I and Nicholas I.

Did Gregory the Great invent Gregorian chant?

No. Gregory worked on the Roman liturgy and is credited with strengthening the papal choir school, but the repertory now called Gregorian chant took its surviving shape in Frankish territory in the eighth and ninth centuries, and the earliest notated manuscripts date from the ninth century. The attribution to Gregory comes from Carolingian writers roughly 250 years after his death.

What is the story behind "Not Angles, but Angels"?

Bede tells the story in his Ecclesiastical History around 731, presenting it as a tradition handed down rather than as documented fact. Gregory, still a monk, saw fair-haired boys for sale in the Roman market, was told they were Angles, and answered "Non Angli, sed angeli," not Angles, but angels. The mission he later sent to Kent in 596 is fully documented, whatever the origin of the pun.

When is the feast of St Gregory the Great?

His memorial in the general Roman calendar is 3 September, the anniversary of his consecration as pope in 590. The older Roman calendar and the Byzantine churches keep 12 March, the day he died in 604.

What did Gregory the Great write?

His main works are the Pastoral Rule, a handbook on pastoral office; the Moralia in Job, a commentary in thirty-five books; the Dialogues, whose second book is the only ancient life of St Benedict; forty homilies on the Gospels; homilies on Ezekiel; and a register of more than eight hundred letters.

Why do popes call themselves "servant of the servants of God"?

Gregory was the first pope to use the title Servus servorum Dei. He adopted it while objecting to the title "ecumenical patriarch" used by the patriarch of Constantinople, answering a grand title with a lowly one, and grounding it in Mark 10:43-45, where Jesus says that whoever wishes to be first must be the slave of all.