Moralia in Job 14 part 2/2

Solicitous for the penance of priests and others of the clergy who had fallen, he ordered that they be thrust back into the poorest monasteries, where regular observance flourished, and that sufficient stipends be supplied to them, so that from these the monks—who should bear the care of their amendment—might also have subsidy for living. He took pains to check ambition in the clergy. Hence he ordered Liberatus the deacon, puffed up and distended with a spirit of ambition, to stand in the last place among the other deacons, that he might grow accustomed to humility and subjection (Book I, letters 85 and 84). He commanded that bishops accused of a crime be judged in council according to custom, and be deposed by no other than a synodal sentence (Book III, letter 8).

He established that wandering clerics were not to be received or incardinated without the release or letters dimissory of their own bishop. What he decreed concerning the celibacy of subdeacons must now be examined more carefully (Book I, letter 83). 6. Pope Pelagius II, three years before, had imposed the law of celibacy on the subdeacons of Sicily, after the custom of the Roman Church; and had ordered that those already married be separated from their wives—which seemed to Gregory harsh and inequitable, and liable to very many perils of a worse kind. This decree, therefore, the most wise pontiff so tempered as to allow married subdeacons to retain their wives, on this law: that they should never advance to sacred orders;

「Because no one ought to ascend to the ministry of the altar unless his chastity has been approved before the ministry is undertaken」 (Book I, letter 44, and Book IV, letter 34). For the rest, he forbade that thereafter bishops should ordain any subdeacon except one who promised to live chastely. By these things is exploded the little fable which the Centuriators of Magdeburg drew forth from a letter forged under the name of St.

Udalric, bishop of Augsburg, to Pope Nicholas—namely, that our Gregory had first by a solemn decree taken away wives from the priests, but, when he had understood that from his fishpond the heads of infants to the number of six thousand had been drawn out by fishermen, and imputed this infanticide to himself (for he did not doubt that so many infants had been born of the stealthy fornications or adulteries of priests), he unfixed his decree, and repented of so great a crime. As many words here, so many rank and stolid lies of the fable. By what reasoning were those infants' heads cast rather into the fishpond of the pontifical dwellings than into the Tiber, or into the public sewers?

The heads are found and counted—what became of the rest of the corpses? As if it had even the least likelihood that the parricides of those infants, to whom it so greatly mattered to conceal so great a crime, should—having by agreement cast the heads of the slain into the pontifical fishpond—of their own accord, as if in sport, have wished to make it public?

How brazen-faced indeed are those who would have it that Gregory repented of having bound priests and sacred ministers to the law of celibacy—when he himself was never the author of any such law (since indeed it had always been observed at least in the Latin Church, where the canons were in force), nor did he suffer almost any year of his pontificate to pass in which he did not write something concerning the celibacy of the major clergy. Read especially the following letters: Book I, letters 44 and 52; Book IV, letters 26 and 36; Book IX, letter 60; Book X, letter 62; Book XI, letter 64, to Secunda, answering her inquiry, where, speaking of clerics who are free to take wives, he excludes those who are constituted in sacred orders; finally Book XIII, letters

35 and 36. For the rest, it is not worth the trouble to explode this fable by many arguments, since it vanishes at once when it is weighed at what time St. Udalric the bishop lived. For he could not have been contemporary either with Nicholas I or with Nicholas II. On this matter the eminent Cardinal Baronius is to be consulted, at the year 591, number 21. 7. With no less zeal did Gregory guard the chastity and repute of the monks than of the clergy, as we forewarned in the previous chapter, number 6. And indeed he held those most strictly bound who had, by vow or resolve, joined themselves to perpetual chastity, as is placed beyond doubt from his letter to Venantius written in this year. Venantius, sprung it seems of patrician stock in Sicily, had embraced the monastic life;

but afterward, having left the monastery, he had married a woman by name Italica, or had returned to one previously married, from whom he begot two daughters, Barbara and Antonina. That in those times some monks had publicly taken wives St. Gregory laments (Book I, letter 42), and orders that they be torn from them and thrust back into a monastery, as we have already observed. Our Mabillon suspects that Italica was Venantius's parent, not his wife (Benedictine Annals, year 601, page 266); but—be it said with the peace of so great a man—this conjecture collapses when the inscription of letter 125 of Book IX is read.

Nor does the title of 「Chancellor of Italy,」 which is gratuitously conferred upon this patrician, rest on any firmer foundation—drawn as it is from the corrupt inscriptions of the letters which the printed codices have, but not those written by hand. That Barbara and Antonina were born before Venantius's fall, nothing compels us to say. Venantius had departed from the monastery some years before Gregory undertook the pontificate. His daughters addressed Gregory by letter in the eleventh year of his pontificate, one perhaps twelve, the other ten years old (Book XI, letters 35 and 78). What need of supposing them beyond that age?

It was no more at variance with the most holy pontiff's piety honorably to greet and to protect noble maidens, even though born of unlawful nuptials, than to write in most reverent and friendly words to their dear parents Venantius and Italica, and to rebuke John, bishop of Syracuse, for the offerings of Venantius which he had refused (Book VI, letter 44). We have run a little beyond bounds, weighing the conjectures of a most learned man; now we must return to that from which we digressed. 8. Gregory wrote to Venantius, deserter of the monastic resolve, a weighty letter, that he might exhort him to penance—which may easily be read. Especially worthy of note are these words:

「Ananias had vowed money to God, which afterward, overcome by diabolical persuasion, he withdrew (Acts 5). But by what death he was punished, you know. If, therefore, he was worthy of the peril of death who took away from God the coins he had given, consider with how great a peril in the divine judgment you will be worthy—you who withdrew from Almighty God, to whom you devoted yourself under the monastic habit, not coins, but your very self. Consider the judgment of God which he deserves, who vowed himself to God, and, being straightway ensnared by the desires of the world, lied concerning what he vowed」 (Book I, letter 34). By which words what could be said more expressly to establish the obligation of monastic vows?

The incestuous marriages of monks and nuns Pope Siricius had long before condemned as contrary to the public laws and to ecclesiastical right, writing to Himerius, bishop of Tarragona (Letter I, ch. 6, Vol. I of the Councils, p. 1019). In support are the Council of Chalcedon, canon 16, and the Fourth of Carthage, to which Augustine subscribed, chapter 104. Augustine, however, seems to teach that the marriages of those who have vowed continence are not adulteries, although he judges their fall worse than any adultery (Book On the Good of Widowhood, chapters 10, 11, 12). But he contends that this vice belongs to those who marry, not to the marriages themselves, which are holy and never to be condemned.

Thus indeed the holy doctor speaks, lest he seem to consent with the Manichaeans who condemn marriage. This question, proposed to him, St. Bernard touches in his book On Precept and Dispensation, chapter 17, but decides nothing. Venantius did not come to his senses; nor yet did Gregory spring back from friendship with him, hoping that a more opportune time would sometime be at hand for exhorting his friend again to penance.

Indeed, having afterward heard of the grave sickness with which he lay abed, being solicitous for his salvation, he wrote to John, bishop of Syracuse, that he ought to think about his soul—by exhorting, by entreating, by setting before him the terrible judgment of God, by promising His ineffable mercy—that he might return to his habit even at the last, lest the guilt of so great a fault stand against him in the eternal judgment (Book XI, letter 36). But what followed thereupon we do not know. Of Venantius there will yet later be occasion to treat. Now let us pass over from Sicily into Africa, where the pontifical authority of St. Gregory, and his pastoral solicitude, became manifest in the first year in which he ascended the Roman See.