Letter 1,76 - to Leo, bishop in Corsica. August 591.
"Pastoral care obliges us to help a church bereft of a priest's guidance with concerned care. And since we recognize that the church of Saona has been totally destitute for many years, since the death of its bishop, we have thought that the task of visiting it should be imposed on your Fraternity, as fas as its usefulness can be completed by your arrangements.
And in that church also and its parishes, we grant you the freedom to ordain deacons and priests. But with regard to them, be keen to examine them quite diligently, to ensure that none of them should be rejected by the sacred canons.
But those whom your Fraternity sees as worthy of such great ministry, recognizing their morals and actions as being in accord with this ordination, let it freely promote to the aforesaid office, with the permission of our authority."
Cited from: The Letters of Gregory the Great, trans. John R.C. Martyn (Toronto: PIMS, 2004), I: 189.
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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