St. Gregory the Great

Gregory was born at Rome about the year 540, of a wealthy senatorial house, and rose to be prefect of the city. At the height of that office he laid it down, turned the family estates into monasteries, and made his own house on the Caelian hill into one more, where he lived as a monk.

He was sent to Constantinople as the pope's representative, and there, at the request of the brethren who had come with him, he began the work on the book of Job that became the Moralia: thirty-five books reading Job historically, allegorically and morally, delivered first as conferences to his monks.

In 590, when plague was in the city and he had tried to refuse, he was made bishop of Rome. He called himself the servant of the servants of God, a title his successors kept. He fed the poor of the city from the Church's estates, ordered its worship, sent Augustine and his companions to preach to the English, and wrote the Pastoral Rule on the care of souls, which became the handbook of bishops in both East and West.

He reposed on the twelfth of March in the year 604. The Orthodox Church honors him as Gregory the Dialogist and ascribes to him the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts served in Great Lent, a tradition of long standing in the East whatever the history of the rite itself.