Letter 1,14 - to Demetrius, bishop of Naples. December 590.
"Stephen, the bearer of this letter, when his mind was wavering from the path of truth concerning certain articles of faith, had suspended himself from the communion of the Catholic Church because of his doubts over this matter, until God, the discloser of truth, should recall him to the path of righteousness. Please recognize that he has satisfied us and has taken communion, accepting the Catholic faith. (..) We give you this advice with the present letter, by virtue of our faith and at risk to us, that they [Stephen and a group sharing his earlier doubts, AS], that they themselves seem to have demanded. Receive them into the Catholic faith and communion, and recall them from the darkness into light in whatever ways you can, so that after a case of this sort has been brought to us, even if we pass over it in silence, we cannot endure the failure of negligence over their souls."
Cited from: The Letters of Gregory the Great, trans. John R.C. Martyn (Toronto: PIMS, 2004), I: 130.
About Me & About the Project
- Arnold Smeets
- BIO - I am a theologian. Radio broadcaster at Dutch Public Broadcast Organisation KRO-NCRV and Senior Research Fellow at CPO (Centre for Patristic Studies), the Netherlands. In 2007 I took my degree cum laude at the Faculty of Catholic Theology of the University of Tilburg on a semiotic analysis of three letters of Pope Gregory the Great (Ad Leandrum, concerning his own conversion, and Ep. xi,37 and Ep. xi,56, two instructions on the mission of the English). PROJECT - Every few days I'll blog a paragraph and twitter a line from one of Gregory the Great's Letters. Passages from the letters are quoted with kind permission of the publishers, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, Canada.
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