Gregory I

A Roman aristocrat turned monk whose pontificate shaped the medieval papacy. He governed Rome and the church's estates like a ruler, sent missionaries to the English, wrote the Pastoral Rule, and taught in his Dialogues a cleansing fire after death that fed the later doctrine of purgatory. Catholic tradition calls him Gregory the Great.

Early life

A Prefect Who Became a Monk

Gregory was born in Rome around 540 into one of the city's old senatorial families. His father, Gordianus, held an office in the Roman church's administration, his mother, Silvia, was later honored as a saint, and Felix III, bishop of Rome in the 480s, was among his ancestors. He grew up in a city battered by twenty years of war between Justinian's armies and the Ostrogoths, and by recurring plague.

Gregory received the best education Rome still offered, in grammar, rhetoric, and law, and entered public life. By about 573 he was prefect of the city, its highest civil office. Soon afterward, on his father's death, he left that career behind. He used his inherited estates in Sicily to found six monasteries, turned the family house on the Caelian Hill into a monastery dedicated to St. Andrew, and entered it as a monk.

The bishop of Rome would not leave him in the cloister. Pelagius II ordained him one of the seven deacons of the Roman church and, around 579, sent him to Constantinople as his envoy to the emperor's court, to plead for help against the Lombards who were overrunning Italy. Gregory spent some six years in the capital, kept a circle of monks around him, and began a long commentary on the book of Job. The help never came. He returned to his monastery about 585 or 586.

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