In every public or private trouble or upheaval, as well as in every effort to reorganize and restore, his name, his presence is dominant. After becoming Pope he lived chiefly at the Lateran palace, then the official Papal residence, and they still keep there the narrow pallet that served him for a bed, and—mark this, ye modern schoolboys!—the little rod which he had to use to keep his dark-eyed, rampageous young choristers in order!
The men who can govern others with the most unerring wisdom are often entirely mistaken in their appreciation of themselves. Only the other day the local and most successful Superior of a great missionary order in America was bewailing his fate to me. “I told the Bishop he was making a dreadful mistake in making me the Rector,” he declared, “it is not my work—I was not intended to govern and lead! I am a born free-lance—I want to travel all over the country seeking out the lost souls. I am no good at anything else!”
But the Bishop knew better; and so it was with the great crowd of clergy and laity who designated Gregory for the Papacy. What he accomplished during his pontificate has been well summed up by Montalembert: “Gregory, who alone amongst men has received, by universal consent, the double surname of Saint and Great, will be an everlasting honour to the Benedictine order, as to the Papacy. By his genius, but especially by the charm and ascendancy of his virtue, he was destined to organize the temporal power of the Popes, to develop and regulate their spiritual sovereignty, to found their paternal supremacy over the new-born crowns and races which were to become the great nations of the future, and to be called France, Spain, and England. It was he, indeed, who inaugurated the Middle Ages, modern society, and Christian civilization.”
The task he undertook was a gigantic one, for on the one side he had to contend with the exactions and oppressions of the corrupt and decrepit Byzantine Emperors who were still the nominal rulers of Rome and his own secular masters on the other, with the great new forces let loose on the world in the increasing vigour and supremacy of the Lombards and other northern nations, more than half barbarous still, but, as Gregory clearly perceived, possessed of an intelligence and vitality which only required training and instruction to grow into great new polities which would replace the already dead Roman Empire.
To appreciate his labours one would have to read that colossal correspondence which has fortunately been preserved entire. Beside the mighty matters of Church and Empire which it sets forth, there shows all through the most tender and minute care for the lower and therefore unprotected classes, as well as for individual souls. Slavery, in every form, excited Gregory’s generous indignation, and his most earnest efforts were devoted to restoring slaves to the rank of human beings. The peasants on the great estates were serfs—practically slaves. He decreed that their marriages should be inviolable, their property their own, their wills valid; that wherever possible the Church revenues should be devoted to buying the freedom of slaves, and that never, on any plea, should Christians be sold to Jews or pagans. At the same time he enacted that neither Jews nor pagans should be baptized by force, and commanded that the synagogues of the Jews should be restored to them and that they should be allowed freedom of worship.
Always humble and diffident about asking anything for himself, it is amusing to find him severely reprimanding a Bishop who had authorized or permitted extortionate exactions to be practised against an obscure farmer in Sardinia, and at the same time writing meekly to the overseer of some ecclesiastical property in Sicily—a stud farm where were kept four hundred stallions: “You have sent me one bad horse and four asses. I cannot ride the horse, because it is bad, nor the asses, because they are asses. If you would assist to sustain me, send me something that I can use!”
But after all the special bond between St. Gregory and English-speaking peoples lies in the memorable act by which England was evangelized, after the Faith first planted there had been annihilated by the pagan Barbarians, Saxons, Angles, Scandinavians, to whom she fell an easy prey when Rome withdrew its protecting legions and abandoned her to her fate.
It is rather sweet to know that it was the fair, innocent beauty of a group of English children, standing, dazed and frightened, in the market to be sold, that first touched his heart to such warm pity for their country. He was then living as the Abbot of the community he had founded on the Cœlian Hill, and enough has been said to show how happy he was in his quiet life there.
It must have been some unusual necessity which took him far down into the town on a certain day and through the noisy crowded slave market. But on seeing the children, with their blue eyes full of tears and their long golden hair shining in the sun, everything else was forgotten; he stopped abruptly to ask who they were.
“Angles, from the isle of Britain,” was the answer, given indifferently enough. The keeper knew that the big, dark-faced monk was not a slave-buyer.