Lord, Bring Your Day To Dawn On Us Series

Tuesday of 22nd Week in Course 2019

St. Gregory the Great

Early Christians knew themselves to be the heirs of the promise God made to the people of Israel, and they looked forward to “the day of the Lord” in which God would act to redeem His people and make every thing that is wrong to be right. We know from our Christian faith, a faith proclaimed by St. Paul to the Thessalonians, that the Day of the Lord will be our Resurrection day, when Jesus will return in glory and judge both the living and the dead. We proclaim our faith in that mystery every Sunday and solemnity of the year.

In pretty much every age of the Church, things have looked so challenging that Catholics have prayed to God to make that Day dawn. And Christians of all types have been tempted to, and have often done it–predicted when Jesus would return. There are whole denominations, like the Adventists, whose founding was predicated on such predictions. But just as a cat burglar comes at an unexpected time, so also will Jesus return without being expected. So St. Paul warns us to keep sober and awake in the moral battle against evil and for the Good, for the Church, for our witness. And we can be confident that if we are faithful, whether we survive until Christ’s coming or not, we will live with Him forever and rise with our glorified bodies with all of His saints.

In Jesus’s time, which was also a time of trouble, with the Romans in Judea and Galilee and rebels almost all the time trying to kick them out, His mastery of the demons was a sign that the Day of the Lord was in some way upon them. When Jesus preached, He did not cite rabbinic teachers. He spoke from His own authority. If He cited anything, it was the Old Testament, which, of course, He divinely authored. This is one of the reasons so many people in Galilee followed Him, and spread the tale of His wonderful works. But St. Luke reminds us from time to time that His ultimate destination was Jerusalem, that unbelieving city of political intrigue. And it was always clear that He would be vilified, arrested, imprisoned and ultimately executed for telling God’s truth, for Being God’s Truth. Yet God always gets the last throw of the dice in the games humans contrive. And His last move is always resurrection from the dead.

Pope St. Gregory I also lived in a tumultuous time. Reading his writings and reviewing all the reforms he instituted, we might think he served as bishop of Rome more than the fourteen years of his rule. The barbarian Lombards were ravaging Italy and one time Gregory had to intervene to save Rome. There was trouble with the Eastern empire as well. The seventh century was a mess.

“His book, Pastoral Care , on the duties and qualities of a bishop, was read for centuries after his death. [We still read sections in the Divine Office.] He described bishops mainly as physicians whose main duties were preaching and the enforcement of discipline.”

During his time, Gregory “removed unworthy priests from office, forbade taking money for many services, emptied the papal treasury to ransom prisoners of the Lombards and to care for persecuted Jews and the victims of plague and famine.” He also sent Augustine and his brother monks to England to begin the reconversion of that island to Catholicism. As part of his reforms, he standardized the liturgical books and did enough for sacred music so that the plainchant is known as “Gregorian” chant.

Gregory “is the patron saint of musicians, singers, students, and teachers” and surely deserves to be one of the great patrons of our difficult age, in which pretty much everything needs reformation. And so we pray “St. Gregory the Great, pray for us.”