Letter 2,3 - to the clergy, nobility, senate and people living at Naples. September 591.
"Although the sincere devotion of its spiritual sons towards their mother Church might need no exhortation, nevertheless, to prevent it from thinking that it should be neglected, this devotion ought to be stimulated with an epistolary exhortation.
Because of this I approach your Beloved with a warning of fatherly love, that we should give thanks unanimously to our redeemer with tears in our eyes, as he has not allowed you to go astray under such a corrupt preacher, but has made public the sins of an unworthy priest.
For Demetrius, who had not earned the name of bishop beforehand, has been found to be implicated in business dealings of such magnitude and of such a kind, that if he had been judged without pity, in accordance with the nature of his crimes, he should have been punished without doubt by divine and human laws with an extremely cruel death."
Cited from: The Letters of Gregory the Great, trans. John R.C. Martyn (Toronto: PIMS, 2004), I: 195.
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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