I couldn’t let the day slip by without a prayerful salute to my patron: St. Gregory the Great. Deacon, monk, writer, musician, pope. Among other things, he was the one who coined the phrase “servant of the servants of God” to describe the pontiff. And, he was quite an innovator:

Saint Gregory was, above all else, a vigilant guardian of the Church’s doctrine, always the mark of a holy Pope. He ordained, early in his pontificate that the first four Ecumenical Councils of the Church should be treated with the respect given to the four Gospels. He worked unceasingly to stamp out heresy. He ordered that at the beginning of Lent the blessed ashes should be placed on the foreheads of the faithful, instead of upon only the head of the Pope — as had been the custom up to that time — and that the priest should repeat to each one, “Remember, man, that dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.”

Saint Gregory was the first Pope to use the phrase, “to speak ex cathedra.” He reorganized the “stations,” still mentioned in the Roman Missal, especially in the Lenten Masses. It was then the custom for a part of the clergy to walk with the people in procession to whatever church was the “station” for the day, and there together they would hear Mass. The Pope would preside at the Mass, and, on most occasions, he would preach. Saint Gregory preached as often as his failing voice would let him.

Somehow, in the midst of his weighty burdens and his constant ill-health, Saint Gregory managed to compile a volume of the prayers, or collects, said in the Mass, and this he called the Sacramentary. He insututed, at Rome, a school of chanters, the famous schola cantorum, about which we hear so much today. For the schola cantorum, he built two houses, one near the Basilica of Saint Peter and the other near the Church of Saint John Lateran. John the Deacon gives us an interesting sidelight on the healthy educational methods of a saint when he tells us, in his narration of the two houses which sheltered the schola cantorum, that in them “we find preserved, with proper veneration, the authentic Antiphonary, the couch on which he used to chant, and the rod with which he disciplined the boys.”

There has been a revival also in our day of the beautifully reverent “Gregorian Chant,” named in honor of Saint Gregory’s patient labor in restoring the ancient chant of the Church and in setting down the rules to be followed so that Church music might more perfectly fulfill its function. Pope Gregory held that the place of Church music was a subordinate one. It should never provide, he said, anything more than a background for the sacred reenactment of Calvary. It should never draw attention to itself, and away from the Holy sacrifice of the Mass. It should, while disposing the minds of the faithful to profound reverence of God, and making more ardent the love of their hearts for Him, never become an end in itself.

To set the proper mood: below, some gorgeous Gregorian chant, with some lovely and evocative monastic snapshots. Enjoy.