Today the Church marks the feast of St. Gregory the Great, pope and doctor of the Church. He was born around 540, just a few years before the death of another great European saint (and co-patron of Europe) Benedict of Nursia. The lives of these two men are similar in interesting ways. But the ways in which their lives ultimately diverge also reveal something about how the Lord provides for his Church.
Gregory was born into one of the great families of Rome. Among its members were many senators, consuls, and more than one emperor. Gregory’s father was a senator and his great-great-grandfather was Pope St. Felix III.
Rome, in Gregory’s day, was a shell of its former self. The sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 (which spurred Augustine to write The City of God) had been followed by an even more devastating invasion at the hands of the Vandals in 455. The Western Empire collapsed in 476.
Rome itself, which at its imperial peak boasted a population of more than 1 million, had shriveled to just 30-40,000 inhabitants by the middle of the sixth century. War, plague, and the other miseries of imperial collapse had transformed Rome
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