Quote from Letter 4,23 - to the nobles and landowners living on the island of Sardinia. May 594
I suggest that you should with all care and all concern be full of zeal over your souls, and consider what accounts you will render to almighty God of your subjects. For they have been entrusted to you for this purpose, that they might serve your advantage in earthly things, and that you also, through your care of them, might provide for their souls those things which are eternal.
Therefore, if they pay what they owe, why do you not pay what you owe to them? That is, your Greatness should warn them assiduously, and restrain them from the error of idolatry, so that, by leading them back to the faith, you may make almighty God amenable towards yourselves. For look, you see how near the end is closing on this world. You see that now a human sword, and now a divine one threatens us. And yet you worshippers of a true God, do you watch the worship of stones by those entrusted to you, and keep silent?
Cited from: The Letters of Gregory the Great, trans. John R.C. Martyn (Toronto: PIMS, 2004), I: 304
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment