Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 6.djvu/868

 GREOOR7

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GREGORY

leave Rome is a sufficient proof of the position he now held there. He was in fact the chief adviser and assistant of Pelagius II, towards whom he seems to have acted very much in the capacity of secretary (see the letter of the Bishop of Ravenna to Gregory, Epp., Ill, \xvi, "Sedem apostolicam, quam antea moribus nunc etiam iionore debito gubernatis"). In this capacity, probably in 586, Gregory wrote his impor- tant letter to the sehismatical bishops of Istria who had separated from communion with the Church on the question of the Three Chapters (Epp., Appendi-x, III, iii). This document, which is almost a treatise in length, is an admirable example of Gregory's skill, but it failed to produce any more effect than Pelagius's two previous letters had, and the schism continued.

The year 589 was one of widespread disaster through- out all the empire. In Italy there was an unprece- dented inundation. Farms and houses were carried away by the floods. The Tiber overflowed its banks, destroying numerous buildings, among them the granaries of the Church with all the store of com. Pestilence followed on the floods, and Rome became a very city of the dead. Business was at a standstill, and the streets were deserted save for the wagons which bore forth countless corpses for burial in common pits beyond the city walls. Then, in February, 590, as if to fill the cup of miser}' to the brim, Pelagius II died. The choice of a successor lay with the clergy and people of Rome, and without any hesitation they elected Gregory, .\bbot of St. Andrew's. In spite of their unanimity Gregory shrank from the dignity thus offered him. He knew, no doubt, that its acceptance meant a final good-bye to the cloister life he loved, and so he not only refused to accede to the prayers of his fellow-citizens but also wrote personally to the Emperor Maurice, begging him with all earnestness not to confirm the election. Germanus, prefect of the city, suppressed this letter, however, and sent irtstead of it the formal schedule of the election. In the interval while awaiting the emperor's reply the business of the vacant see was transacted by Gregory, in commission with two or three other high official. As the plague still continued unabated, Gregory called upon the people to join in a vast sevenfold procession which was to start from each of the seven regions of the city and meet at the basilica of the Blessed Virgin, all praying the while for pardon and the withdrawal of the pestilence. This was accordingly done, and the memory of the event is still preserved by the name " Sant' Angelo" given to the mausoleum of Hadrian from the legend that the .\rchangel St. Michael was seen upon its summit in the act of sheathing his sword as a sign that the plague was over. At length, after six months of waiting, came the emperor's confirmation of Gregory's election. The saint was terrified at the news and even meditated flight. He was seized, how- ever, carried to the Basilica of St. Peter, and there consecrated pope on 3 September, 590. The story that Gregory actually fled the city and remained hidden in a forest for three days, when his whereabouts was revealed by a supernatural light, seems to be pure invention. It appears for the first time in the Whitby life (c. vii), and is directly contrary to the words of his contemporary, Gregory of Tours (Hist. Franc, X, i). Still he never ceased to regret his elevation, and his later writings contain numberless expressions of strong feeling on this point.

III. As Pope, 590-604. — Fourteen years of life remained to Gregory, and into these he crowded work enough to have exhausted the energies of a lifetime. What makes his achievement more wonderful is his constant ill-health. He suffered almost continually from indigestion and, at intervals, from attacks of slow fever, while for the last half of his pontificate he was a martyr to gout. In spite of these infirmities, which increased steadily, his biographer, Paul the Deacon,

tells us "he never rested" (Vita, xv). His work as pope is of so varied a nature that it will be best to take it in sections, although this destroys any exact chrono- logical sequence. At the very outset of his pontificate Gregory published his " Liber pastoralis cura-", or book on the office of a bishop, in which he lays down clearly the lines he considers it his duty to follow. The work, which regards the bishop pre-eminently as the physician of souls, is divided into four parts. He points out in the first that onl}' one skilled already as a physician of the soul is fitted to undertake the "su- preme rule" of the episcopate. In the second he describes how the bishop's life should he ordered from a spiritual point of view ; in the third, how he ought to teach and admonish those under him, and in the fourth how, in spite of his good works, he ought to bear in mind his own weakness, since the better his work the greater the danger of falling through self-con- fidence. This little work is the key to Gregory's life as pope, for what he preached he practised. More- over, it remained for centuries the textbook of the Catholic episcopate, so that by its influence the ideal of the great pope has moulded the character of the Church, and his spirit has spread into all lands.

(1) Lt'le and Work in Rome. — As pope Gregorj' still lived with monastic simplicity. One of his first acts was to banish all the lay attendants, pages, etc., from the Lateran palace, and substit ute clerics in their place. There was now no magister mililum living in Rome, so the control even of military matters fell to the pope. The inroads of the Lombards had filled the city with a multitude of indigent refugees, for whose support Gregor\' made provision, using for this purpose the existing machinery of the ecclesiastical districts, each of which had its cleaconrj' or "office of alms". The corn thus distributed came chiefly from Sicily and was supplied by the estates of the Church. The temporal needs of his people being thus provided for, Gregory did not neglect their spiritual wants, and a large number of his sermons have come down to us. It was he who instituted the "stations" still observed and noted in the Roman Missal (see Stations). He met the clergy and people at some church previously agreed upon, and all together went in procession to the cliurch of the station, where Mass was celebrated and the pope preached. These sermons, which drew im- mense crowds, are mostly simple, popular expositions of Scripture. Chiefly remarkable is the preacher's mastery of the Bible, which he quotes unceasingly, and his regular use of anecdote to illustrate the point in hand, in which respect he paves the way for the popular preachers of the Middle Ages. In July, 595, Gregory held his first synod in St. Peter's, which con- sisted almost wholly of the bishops of the suburbicar- ian sees and the priests of the Roman titular churches. Si.x decrees dealing with ecclesiastical discipline were passed, some of them merely confirming changes already made by the pope on his own authority.

Much controversy still exists as to the exact extent of Gregory's reforms of the Roman Liturgy. All ad- mit that he did make the following modifications in the pre-existing practice: (a) In the Canon of the Mass he inserted the words "diesque nostros in tua pace disponas, atque ab a>temd damnatione nos eripi, et in eleetorum tuorum jubeas grege numerari"; (b) he ordered the Pater Noster to be recited in the Canon before the breaking of the Host; (c) he provided that the Alleluia should be chanted after the Gradual out of paschal time, to which period, apparently, the Roman use hail previously confined it; (d) he pro- hibited the use of the chasuble by subdeacons aaeisting at Mass; (e) he forbade deacons to perform any of the musical portions of the Mass other than singing the Gospel. Beyond these and some few minor points it seems impossible to conclude with certainty what changes Gregory did make. As to the much-disputed question of the Gregorian Sacramentary and the