Gregory the Great

The bread that bled

A monk of Whitby, writing a Life of Gregory early in the 700s, calls this an old story. A Roman lady had baked the bread for Mass. When Gregory gave it to her as the Body of Christ, she smiled. He held it back and laid it on the altar. After Mass he asked her why she had smiled. She said she had made that bread with her own hands. He had the people pray, and on the altar the bread was found as a bleeding scrap, like a piece of a little finger. She believed. At their next prayer it became bread again, and she received it. Her words, in the Latin of the Life:

“Ego ipsos panes meis feci manibus”

The dove at his lips

A monk of Whitby, who wrote a Life of Gregory, heard that someone of Gregory's household saw a white dove sitting on him while he composed his sermons on Ezekiel. Gregory was angry, and forbade him to tell anyone while he lived. A later version, added to Paul the Deacon's Life, names the witness: Peter, his secretary. A curtain hung between them. When Gregory fell silent for long spells, Peter made a hole in it with his pen. This is why painters give Gregory a dove.

“he beheld a dove, whiter than snow, sitting upon Gregory's head, and holding its beak for a long time to his lips”

Tears for Trajan

The monk of Whitby who wrote a Life of Gregory is careful with this story: some of his people, he says, heard it from the Romans. Crossing Trajan's Forum, Gregory remembered the pagan emperor Trajan, who once stopped on his way to war to do justice for a widow. Gregory went to St Peter's and wept for Trajan's soul, until he learned that his prayer was heard. He was warned never to ask it again for a pagan. The writer's own words:

“quidam quoque de nostris dicunt narratum a Romanis”

The cloth that bled

Gregory told this story himself, of an earlier pope. Some Greeks doubted that cloths laid on martyrs' tombs were true relics. So Pope Leo cut one with scissors, and blood flowed from the cut. The Life by a monk of Whitby later told a story like it of Gregory himself.

“the aforesaid pontiff took scissors and cut this same cloth (brandeum), and from the very incision blood flowed”

The letter to Phocas

In 602 the soldier Phocas overthrew the emperor Maurice and had him and his sons killed. The next year Gregory wrote Phocas a joyful letter of welcome. The historian Gibbon said it “has sullied, with indelible disgrace, the character of the saint”. Defenders say Gregory may not have known how Phocas came to power, and that he honoured the office, not the man. The Catholic Encyclopedia calls the question “a difficult one”.

“Glory to God in the highest Who, according as it is written, changes times, and transfers kingdoms”

The Jews

He forbade forcing Jews to be baptised, and ordered that synagogues wrongly taken be paid for. Jews should have what the law allowed them, he held, no more and no less. But he also cut the rents of Jewish tenants on church land who became Christians, “to the end that others also, incited by this benefit, may be moved to a like desire”. Britannica sums it up: “His concern with justice for Jews was limited.”

“For, when any one is brought to the font of baptism, not by the sweetness of preaching, but by compulsion, he returns to his former superstition, and dies the worse from having been born again.”

Pressure on pagans

Where preaching failed, he used pressure. He told a bishop in Sardinia to load pagan peasants on church land with heavy dues until they gave in. His own translator, James Barmby, wrote in 1895 that his zeal had betrayed him “into a certain human inconsistency”. Britannica adds that he advised Queen Brunhild to use armed force against pagans.

“he must be weighted with so great a burden of payment as to be compelled by the very pain of the exaction to hasten to the right way”

Slavery

He freed two slaves of the Church, Montana and Thomas, and wrote that people are born free by nature. He also told his agent in Gaul to spend the Church's money there on clothes for the poor, or on buying English boys of about seventeen or eighteen “who may profit by being given to God in monasteries”. He ran the Church's great estates in an age of slavery, and never called for its end. Britannica says he “did tolerate slavery”.

“it is a salutary deed if men whom nature originally produced free, and whom the law of nations has subjected to the yoke of slavery, be restored by the benefit of manumission to the liberty in which they were born.”

Mary Magdalene

In a sermon he made three women one. Luke's sinful woman, he said, is Mary of Bethany, Martha's sister, who anoints Jesus in John's Gospel. She is also Mary Magdalene, from whom Mark says seven demons were cast out. He called her a sinner, not a prostitute. In 1969 the Catholic calendar parted them again. Its day for her, 22 July, is for Mary Magdalene alone.

Pagan learning

He scolded Desiderius, bishop of Vienne, for teaching grammar from the pagan poets. A later tale says Gregory burned the Palatine library. Gibbon, no friend of popes, doubted it: “the evidence of his destructive rage is doubtful and recent”.

“we changed what had been said before into groaning and sadness, since the praises of Christ cannot find room in one mouth with the praises of Jupiter.”

Purgatory and hell

In the Dialogues he teaches a cleansing fire after death for small sins, and a hell that never ends. The Reformers rejected purgatory. Calvin called it “a deadly device of Satan”.

“But yet we must believe that before the day of judgment there is a Purgatory fire for certain small sins”