Friday of the Twenty-Second Week in Ordinary Time

Year of Saint Joseph

Year of the Family "Amoris Laetitia The Joy of Love"

Saint: Pope Saint Gregory the Great, Doctor of the Church, "Servant of the servants of God" (540-604)

First Friday of the Month

Readings of the Day

RB: Prologue 14-20 

Mass: Col 1:15-20; Resp Ps 100; Lk 5:33-39

Serve the Lord with gladness.

BLESSED GREGORY, RAISED UPON THE THROWN OF PETER, SOUGHT ALWAYS THE BEAUTY OF THE LORD AND LIVED IN CELEBRATION OF THAT LOVE.

(Entrance Antiphon, Mass)

On this First Friday of the Month we commemorate Pope Saint Gregory the Great. And how great he was! He was certainly a man who listened to the Lord through the words of Saint Benedict: "Seeking his workman in a multitude of people, the Lord calls out to him and lifts his voice again: Is there anyone here who yearns for life and desires to see good days?" (RB Prol. 14). Furthermore, what is known of the life of Saint Benedict comes from one principal source, Pope Saint Gregory the Great, who in the second book of his Dialogues recounts the Life and Miracles of Saint Benedict. Here is more about our saint of the day, from a footnote in a 2012 thesis of mine, The Lived Theology of St. Benedict: Echoes of St. Paul the Apostle in the "Holy Rule":

St. Gregory the Great (ca. 540-604) comes with his own impeccable credentials. Around 575 he converted his home on the Coelian Hill in Rome into a monastery and founded six other monasteries in Sicily. Gregory became a deacon to Pope Pelagius II and was then elected Pope in 590. He left voluminous writings for all the faithful-laity, monks, and clergy-including 580 letters, works on the moral life, the priesthood, homilies, and his Dialogues, the Dialogorum Libri, presented as a dialogue between Gregory and his deacon, Peter. The first three books of the Dialogue contain stories about the lives and miracles of Italian saints. The fourth book contains teaching on the moral life. Book II is "the best and practically only source of information about St. Benedict" (Jordan Aumann, Christian Spirituality in the Catholic Tradition, London, 1985, pp. 74-75).

The following quotations are all attributed to our saint of the day:

Merely to love things above is already to mount on high.

(Pope Saint Gregory the Great) 

Be not anxious about what you have, but about what you are.

(Pope Saint Gregory the Great)

When we are linked by the power of prayer, we, as it were, hold each other's hand as we walk side by side along a slippery path; and thus by the bounteous disposition of charity, it comes about that the harder each one leans on the other, the more firmly we are riveted together in brotherly love.

(Pope Saint Gregory the Great)

POPE SAINT GREGORY THE GREAT,

SAINT JOSEPH,

PRAY FOR US.

Today's photo: From our garden of delights.

© Gertrude Feick 2021