GREGORY the GREAT (540-604) Pope & “Apostle” (September 3)
Anytime some historical person is called “the Great,” you can be sure that there have been just oodles of stories and even whole books written about him or her, and that is definitely true of today’s saint, so I’ll try to keep it simple. I wish I could tell you about the time when Saint Gregory made Saint Michael sheathe his sword, or about when Gregory washed the feet of an angel at his supper-table, but there it is: he just did too many things!
Most of the important things Gregory did were while he was bishop of Rome. Now if you’re bishop of Rome, you are also automatically in charge of the whole Roman Catholic part of the Christian faith, and you’re called the Pope. Back when Gregory was Pope the Christian faith was still in one piece: the Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, none of those breaks had happened yet; it was all still catholic with a small “c”, meaning “universal.” Just “so’s you knows!” Not only was Gregory bishop of Rome, he was a local boy: he grew up on the Caelian Hill there, in the house that is now underneath a church named in his honor. In fact, he lived across the street from Saint Pammachius’ house, and he liked his former neighbor’s ideas about organizing monasteries, so Gregory actually started a monastery in his own house! This will be important to remember, later in the story.
The times Gregory lived in were smack at the beginning of the Dark Ages: Rome was still in bad shape from being invaded a hundred years earlier by Vandals and Goths, and now the Visigoths were fighting each other all up and down Italy. So Gregory didn’t just have Church business to do like preaching, or organizing the money that came in from Church lands and offerings, he also had to continue to do the business of the Prefect of Rome as well as bishop, that is: making deals with barbarians, trying to fix the water supply, feeding and housing refugees, helping sick people, training troops: all that!
But the thing that all of us who speak English are most glad he did was to send some missionaries up to Great Britain to re-Christianize things there. Ever since the pagan Angles and Saxons had taken over from the Romanized Britons a hundred years before, people had mostly had to worship Woden and Thor and trees and things, or die or move to Wales or to Brittany in France. But there were a few Christians here and there, and one of them was the queen Bertha of Kent, the part of England where Canterbury is and its own separate kingdome in those days, and she wanted a bishop and some monks very badly, and had sent a letter by way of her husband Ethelbert to Gregory, asking nicely for some.
Gregory had been pondering whether to send anyone when one day, they say, he was down near the slave markets in Rome (they still had such terrible things in those days), and he saw some boys for sale, probably stolen by pirates. Those boys had pale gold hair and pale blue eyes and beautiful rosy cheeks, such as Gregory had only ever seen in paintings, and he asked his friend what kind of boys they were. “They are Angles, your holiness,” said his friend, meaning as in Anglo-Saxons, but Gregory wittily disagreed, making one of the most famous puns in history. “No, no, my friend, they are angels!” cried he, and Gregory made up his mind to send missionaries there as soon as possible: forty monks from the monastery in his own house (remember?) along with the monk Augustine whom we call “Augustine of Canterbury.” So Gregory is called “Apostle to the English.” (And I hope he bought those boys and sent them home to England along with Augustine, don’t you?)