Church

He was consecrated patriarch of Ar menia about 302. Gregory I., Saint, surnamed "The Great." Born at Rome about 540: died there, March 12, 604. Pope 590-604. He was descended from an illustrious Roman family, probably the Anicians; studied dialectics, rhetoric, and law; entered the civil service; and about 574 was appointed pretor urban us by the emperor Justin. Retiring from this office in order to consecrate himself to an ecclesiastical life, he employed the wealth left him at his father's death to establish six monasteries in Sicily and one at Rome, and in the last-named foundation he himself became a monk. About 579 he was sent as papal apocrisiarius to Constantinople by Pelagius II. He returned to Rome in 585, and in 590 was elected pope. He restored the monastic discipline, enforced the rule of celibacy of the clergy, arranged the Greg or i an modes or chant, and displayed great zeal in propagating Christianity. It is were Christians!" He would have gone himself as a mi ionary to Britain, but was restrained by the Pope. In 597 he sent Augustine, accompanied by 40 monks, to Ethel. bert, king of Kent, who was baptized with 10,000 of his subjects in the space of a year. His memory is stained by an adulatory letter of congratulation to the usurper and murderer Phocas on his acce ion to the imperial throne, written with a view to gaining his support in a dispute with the patriarch of Constantinople. He was the author of numerous homilies on Ezekiel and the Gospels, "Moralia," "Regula (or Cura) Pastoral is," "Dialogues," "Letters," "Liber Sacramento rum," "Liber Antiphonarius," etc. The best edition of his works is the "Benedictine" (1705).