Gregory began his administration with a public act of humiliation on account of the plague
which had cost the life of his predecessor. Seven processions traversed the streets for three days
with prayers and hymns; but the plague continued to ravage, and demanded eighty victims during
the procession. The later legend made it the means of staying the calamity, in consequence of the
appearance of the archangel Michael putting back the drawn sword into its sheath over the
Mausoleum of Hadrian, since called the Castle of St. Angelo, and adorned by the statue of an angel.
His activity as pontiff was incessant, and is the more astonishing as he was in delicate health
and often confined to bed. "For a long time," he wrote to a friend in 601, "I have been unable to
rise from my bed. I am tormented by the pains of gout; a kind of fire seems to pervade my whole
body: to live is pain; and I look forward to death as the only remedy." In another letter he says: "I
am daily dying, but never die."
Nothing seemed too great, nothing too little for his personal care. He organized and
completed the ritual of the church, gave it greater magnificence, improved the canon of the mass
and the music by a new mode of chanting called after him. He preached often and effectively,
deriving lessons of humility and piety, from the calamities of the times, which appeared to him
harbingers of the judgment-day. He protected the city of Rome against the savage and heretical
Lombards. He administered the papal patrimony, which embraced large estates in the neighborhood
of Rome, in Calabria, Sardinia, Corsica, Sicily, Dalmatia, and even in Gaul and Africa. He
encouraged and advised missionaries. As patriarch of the West, he extended his paternal care over
the churches in Italy, Gaul, Spain, and Britain, and sent the pallium to some metropolitans, yet
without claiming any legal jurisdiction. He appointed, he also reproved and deposed bishops for
neglect of duty, or crime. He resolutely opposed the prevalent practice of simony, and forbade the
clergy to exact or accept fees for their services. He corresponded, in the interest of the church, with
nobles, kings and queens in the West, with emperors and patriarchs in the East. He hailed the return
of the Gothic kingdom of Spain under Reccared from the Arian heresy to the Catholic faith, which
was publicly proclaimed by the Council of Toledo, May 8, 589. He wrote to the king a letter of
congratulation, and exhorted him to humility, chastity, and mercy. The detested Lombards likewise
cast off Arianism towards the close of his life, in consequence partly of his influence over Queen
Theodelinda, a Bavarian princess, who had been reared in the trinitarian faith. He endeavored to
suppress the remnants of the Donatist schism in Africa. Uncompromising against Christian heretics
and schismatics be was a step in advance of his age in liberality towards the Jews. He censured the
bishop of Terracina and the bishop of Cagliari for unjustly depriving them of their synagogues; he
condemned the forcible baptism of Jews in Gaul, and declared conviction by preaching the only
legitimate means of conversion; he did not scruple, however, to try the dishonest method of bribery,
and he inconsistently denied the Jews the right of building new synagogues and possessing Christian
slaves. He made efforts, though in vain, to check the slave-trade, which was chiefly in the hands
of Jews.
After his death, the public distress, which he had labored to alleviate, culminated in a general
famine, and the ungrateful populace of Rome was on the point of destroying his library, when the
archdeacon Peter stayed their fury by asserting that he had seen the Holy Spirit in the form of a
dove hovering above Gregory’s head as he wrote his books. Hence he is represented with a dove.
He was buried in St. Peter’s under the altar of St. Andrew.
Note. Estimates of Gregory I.
rick simeone
(Rick Simeone)
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