Gregory was born in Rome about the year 540, into a wealthy and deeply Christian patrician family. His father, Gordianus, was a senator, for a time Prefect of the City, and also held a churchly office as regionarius; his mother, Silvia, is herself venerated as a saint, as are his two paternal aunts, Trasilla and Emiliana, who lived as consecrated virgins. His great-great-grandfather had been Pope Felix III, so that Gregory's own elevation to the chair of Peter made his house the most illustrious clerical family of the age. The family lived in a villa on the Clivus Scauri on the Caelian Hill, looking across at the ruined palaces of the emperors, and owned working estates in Sicily and around Rome. The very name given him at baptism, as Ælfric of Eynsham later observed, means "watchful" — and, said the old homilist, "he was very diligent in God's Commandments."
His childhood fell in a time of terror. From 542 the plague of Justinian swept Italy, bringing famine, panic, and death to a third of the people in some regions, while Justinian's armies wrested Italy back from the Goths. Rome was sacked and emptied by Totila in 546 and only slowly repopulated from 549. Amid these ruins Gregory received the finest education Rome could still give — grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, literature, the sciences, and law. Gregory of Tours wrote that "in grammar, dialectic and rhetoric ... he was second to none." So promising was he in public life that, like his father before him, he was made Prefect of Rome, the city's highest civil office, while still a young man of about thirty.
Then God called, and Gregory answered without half-measures. On his father's death he turned the ancestral villa on the Caelian into a monastery dedicated to Saint Andrew the Apostle — the house that today bears his own name, San Gregorio Magno al Celio — and became a monk beneath his own roof, founding other monasteries besides on the family lands in Sicily. These were the happiest years of his life, and he never ceased to look back on them. Monastic life, he taught, is the "ardent quest for the vision of our Creator"; and of contemplation he wrote that "in that silence of the heart, while we keep watch within through contemplation, we are as if asleep to all things that are without." His love of holy poverty was uncompromising: when a dying monk was found to have hidden away three gold pieces, Gregory let him die apart from the brethren and had the coins buried with the body on a dunghill with the words, "Take your money with you to perdition" — yet afterwards, out of mercy for the man's soul, he had thirty Masses offered for him, the origin of the ancient custom of the Gregorian Masses. Penance and pity, severity toward sin and tenderness toward the sinner, would mark him all his life.
His peace was not to last. Pope Pelagius II ordained him a deacon of the Roman Church and drew him into the effort to heal the schism of the Three Chapters in northern Italy. Then in 579 the same pope sent him as apocrisiarius, papal ambassador to the imperial court in Constantinople, where he remained until 585, still living monastically with brethren from his own house. He pleaded again and again for imperial troops to relieve Rome from the Lombards, but the Emperor Maurice, pressed by Persians, Avars, and Slavs, would give only diplomacy. Gregory instead became a spiritual father to much of the Byzantine aristocracy, and defended the faith publicly against the aged Patriarch Eutychius, who taught that the risen body would be "more subtle than air, and no longer palpable." Gregory maintained from Scripture that the Lord's risen body was true and palpable flesh; the dispute was argued before the Emperor Tiberius II, who ordered the patriarch's book burned. Both men then fell ill; Gregory recovered, Eutychius retracted his error on his deathbed and died on 5 April 582, and Gregory, satisfied, let the matter rest.
Returning to Rome in 585, he went back gratefully to his monastery on the Caelian, and was chosen its abbot. But in 590 plague again ravaged the city and carried off Pope Pelagius II, and clergy, senate, and people elected Gregory by acclamation to succeed him; the imperial confirmation arrived from Constantinople, and he was consecrated Bishop of Rome on 3 September 590, the day the Church now keeps his feast. He tried to refuse, and wrote letters disowning any ambition for Peter's throne and praising the untroubled life of prayer he had lost. To the end he called himself, without pretence, unworthy of the burden, and mourned the cloister; yet no pope ever bore the burden better.
He found a Rome half-ruined, hungry, and defenceless, and he became its true father. He administered the patrimony of the Church with scrupulous justice so that its revenues became bread for the poor; contemporaries judged that his care for the welfare of the Roman people surpassed anything done by the emperors Maurice and Tiberius. He negotiated with the Lombard dukes when the imperial officers would not, ransomed captives, and shepherded a people the state had abandoned. He restored the effective leadership of the Apostolic See in the West, which had lain dormant since Gelasius I: he recovered papal authority in Spain and Gaul, reformed a bishops' bench too often chosen from great landed families, resisted the Donatist heresy still strong in North Africa, and saw Franks, Visigoths, and at length Lombards abandon Arianism and align themselves with Catholic Rome — a realignment that shaped the whole of medieval Europe. He taught also that the Jews must be protected and left unharmed in the practice of their religion within the bounds of Roman law, forbidding their forced conversion.
His greatest joy was the mission. "Almighty God places good men in authority," he wrote, "that He may impart through them the gifts of His mercy to their subjects." He had never forgotten the fair-haired Anglo-Saxon slave boys he once saw for sale in the Roman market, and had wished to go himself to their island; as pope he sent instead Augustine, prior of his own monastery of Saint Andrew, with a band of monks to preach to the pagan English, and later Paulinus, who carried the Gospel to York. The mission succeeded beyond hope, and from England in turn missionaries went out to the Netherlands and to Germany, so that Gregory is rightly called the Apostle of the English and the reviver of the Church's missionary zeal in northern Europe.
He wrote more than any pope before him — homilies, the Dialogues that won him in the East the name Gregory the Dialogist, and a vast correspondence reaching every corner of the Christian world — always as a pastor teaching souls, never as a mere scholar. Because of his reform and ordering of the Roman liturgy, the Middle Ages hailed him as "the Father of Christian Worship"; tradition attaches his name to the chant of the Roman Church, and his contribution to the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts is so great that the Byzantine Rite reckons him its author.
Worn out by fasting, illness, and labour, Gregory died on 12 March 604 and was buried in Saint Peter's. The Roman people canonized him at once by acclamation, and the Church honours him with Ambrose, Augustine, and Jerome as one of the four great Latin Fathers and Doctors, and as the second of the three popes surnamed "the Great," between Leo I and Nicholas I. He stands at the frontier of two worlds, the ancient and the medieval, and he crossed it carrying the poor of Rome on his shoulders and the Gospel in his hands.
May Saint Gregory the Great obtain for us his own humility in high places and his own zeal for souls, so that today we may serve some poor or forgotten person as though serving Christ Himself.
