Giuseppe Federici Study Center – For a new onset
Saint Gregory the Great
Il 12 March the Roman liturgy celebrates Saint Gregory the Great, Papa, Confessor and Doctor. We remember itor with some passages of the card. Schuster gave his Book of the Sacraments.
This party, also celebrated by the Greeks, it is already found in the Gregorian Sacramentary of the time of Hadrian I, and it is one of the few that has penetrated the Roman Calendar since ancient times during the Lenten period. The celebrity of Saint Gregory (+ 604), and above all the symbolic meaning that his historical personality took on, when in the Middle Ages he embodied the concept of the Roman papacy in the most sublime expression of his primacy over the entire Church, justified this exception. It can indeed be said, that the entire middle age lived by the spirit of Saint Gregory; the Roman liturgy, the sacred song, canon law, monastic asceticism, the apostolate among the infidels, pastoral life, all, in a word, ecclesiastical activity, it reported to the Holy Doctor, whose writings seemed to have become like the universal code of Catholicism. The very large number of ancient churches dedicated to the Holy Pontiff in Rome attests to the popularity of his cult, which, as well as its ancient monastery of Sant'Andrea al Clivo di Scauro, had as its center his venerable tomb in the Vatican basilica. (…)
We must serve the Lord in the conditions in which He has placed us, and not in those in which we would like to place ourselves. A beautiful example of this practical sense on the path to holiness, what Gregorio offers. His thoughtful nature pushed him to the quiet study of philosophy, in the peace of the cloister. God instead wants him to be diplomatic, papa, administrator of an immense real estate asset, even strategist in directing the defense works of the Italian cities besieged by the Langobards; true consul of God, by activity and power as vast as the whole world. Gregorio, very often kept in bed by podagra and stomach pains, without filling the air with his regrets, it adapts wonderfully to all these offices, and with the intention of serving the Lord alone, he supports them with such admirable mastery and perfection, which fills the entire middle age with its spirit, and he leaves deep traces of his genius in the subsequent life of the Roman Pontificate. (…)
The whole Eternal City, of which Gregory was a very vigilant pastor, its station churches, the cemeteries of the Martyrs, they recall the active zeal of the incomparable Pontiff. Some Roman sanctuaries though, today they almost claim the honor of a special celebration and they are: as well as the Vatican basilica which houses his body, that of Sant'Andrea al Clivo di Scauro, where Gregory was first a monk and then abbot; that of Saint Paul, which the saint had embellished and where he had his family's tomb; the Lateran where he lived for almost fourteen years of his supreme pontificate. In the Middle Ages, the fourteen urban regions competed in honoring Gregory and dedicating temples and chapels to his name, so that we have the churches of S. Gregorius to Clivus Scauri, S. Gregory of Cortina, S. Greg0rii de Gradellis, S. Gregorius dei Muratori, S. Gregory in the Field of March, S. Gregory of the Bridge of the Jews, to say nothing of the many other oratories named after him. A bull of Gregory III in the basilica of St. Paul, recalls a daily mass that has been celebrated since that time in that illustrious apostolic sanctuary on the altar of St. Gregory at the doors; precisely as in St. Peter's, where the tomb of the Saint was located in the external portico, close to the secretary. The epigraph of Gregory III to Saint Paul represents perhaps one of the oldest monuments of the liturgical cult attributed to Saint Gregory the Great.
The circumstance that even now the Pope, when on the day of his Coronation he solemnly celebrates the Divine Sacrifice in St. Peter's and assumes the sacred vestments at the altar that covers the tomb of St. Gregory, as well as a special meaning of veneration towards the Saint who has, so to speak, embodied in itself all the most sublime ideal included in the Catholic concept of the Roman Pontificate, comes from the fact that, in origine, the tomb of the great Doctor in the atrium of the Vatican basilica was adjacent to the Secretarium or sacristy, where the sacred ministers dressed themselves in liturgical garments. In the erection of the new St. Peter's Basilica, it was important to preserve this traditional place in San Gregorio, that is, next to the sacristy, and so it was that the custom of the solemn dressing of the Pope at the altar of the Saint was also preserved.
Card. A. I. Schuster, O.S.B. The Book of the Sacraments. Historical and liturgical notes on the Roman Missal – Vol. VII. The Saints in the mystery of the Redemption (The Feasts of the Saints from Lent to the Octave of the Princes of the Apostles), Turin-Rome, Marietti, 1930, pages. 47-57.
SOURCE – http://www.centrostudifederici.org/san-gregorio-magno/