On Holy Ordination

Letter 2,31 - to John, bishop of Squillace, on holy ordination. July 592.

"But we order you never to ordain anyone illegally, and do not permit anyone to take on holy orders who is a bigamist, or one whose wife was not a virgin, or an illiterate person, or one infected in any part of his body, or a penitent, or a person bound to a court or to any other state of servitude.
But if you discover any men of this sort, please do not dare to promote them.
On no account accept Africans indiscriminately, nor unknown strangers, who want to be ordained. For some of the Africans are in fact Manicheans, others re-baptized, and most foreigners in fact, even when established in the minor orders, have often been proved to have had pretensions for higher orders.
We also advise your Fraternity to pay full attentions to the souls entrusted to you, and to turn them more to the profits of the soul than to the comforts of the present life.
Be diligent in conserving and disposing the property of the church, so that the future judge, when he has come to give his judgment, may have approve the fact that you have carried out the office of priest, undertaken by you in a worthy manner."

Cited from: The Letters of Gregory the Great, trans. John R.C. Martyn (Toronto: PIMS, 2004), I: 212.