Gregory the Great takes the throne
Gregory I becomes pope
Gregory does not want to be pope. He has spent years trying to escape public life and return to the monastic community he founded in his own family home on the Caelian Hill in Rome.
He was born around 540 AD into one of the great aristocratic families of Rome — a family with two previous popes in its history, a family of wealth and connections and public obligation. He served as prefect of Rome, the highest civil office in the city, before resigning and becoming a monk.
Monk. It is the word Gregory uses to describe himself throughout his pontificate, even as pope, even in official correspondence. He is always the servant who would rather be in his cell.
When Pope Pelagius II dies of plague in 590 AD, the clergy and people of Rome unanimously elect Gregory. He writes immediately to the emperor in Constantinople, begging to be released from the appointment. The emperor refuses.
He is consecrated pope and throws himself into the work with the same energy he gave everything else. He reorganizes the church's charitable distribution system to care for the plague survivors. He establishes regular feeding programs for the poor. He administers the vast landholdings of the Roman church with the precision of the bureaucrat he once was.
And he writes. He writes constantly — sermons, biblical commentaries, letters (over eight hundred survive), pastoral theology. His Pastoral Rule becomes the standard manual for bishops throughout the medieval church.
He calls himself Servus Servorum Dei — Servant of the servants of God.
He means it.
“I am so shaken by the waves of this world that I cannot steer the old and rotten ship which has been committed to me.”
— Gregory I, Letter to Leander of Seville, c. 590 AD
“For the Son of Man also came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
Gregory called himself a servant and organized the largest Christian institution in the Western world with brilliant administrative competence. The two are not contradictory.
The servant leader does not perform humility while actually wielding power. The servant leader genuinely subordinates the exercise of power to the needs of those being served — and Gregory did this concretely: reorganizing the feeding programs, answering every letter, refusing the trappings of imperial dignity that his predecessors had adopted.
He was not less effective for being a servant. He was more so. The authority of the servant is different from the authority of the lord — it is earned by demonstrated care rather than claimed by position.
How do you exercise whatever authority you have? And for whose benefit is it being exercised?