Gregory the Great in a papal letter (Register 4.18) of 593, to Maurus, abbot of Saint Pancratius, entrusts the care of the burial church at Rome of *Pancratius (martyr of Rome, S00307) to him and a newly established monastery, and orders that divine office be held daily before the saint's body. Written in Latin in Rome.
E06349
Literary - Letters
Gregory the Great (pope)
Pope Gregory the Great, Register of Letters 4.18
From the opening of the letter:
Ecclesiarum cura, quae sacerdotalibus officiis euidenter infixa est, ita nos cogit esse sollicitos, ut nulla in eis culpa neglectus appareat. Quoniam uero ecclesiam sancti Pancratii, quae erat commissa presbyteris, frequenter neglectum habuisse cognouimus, ita ut uenientes dominicorum die populi missarum sollemnia celebraturi, non inuento presbytero, murmurantes redirent.
‘The care of churches, which has clearly been established among priestly duties, forces us to be very much concerned that no fault of neglect should appear in them. But we have learnt that the church of Saint Pancratius, which was entrusted to priests, has frequently suffered from neglect, to the extent that when the people came on a Sunday to celebrate solemn Mass, they found no priest and went home muttering.’
Gregory continues, entrusting the church, and its property, to a new monastery under Maurus as abbot. Towards the end of the letter he writes:
Sed et hoc prae omnibus curae tuae sit ut ibidem ad sacratissimum corpus beati Pancratii cotidie opus dei proculdubio peragatur.
‘But take care over this before all else, that each day the work of God [the Opus Dei or Divine Office] is carried out there without question, before the most sacred body of Saint Pancratius’.
Text: Norberg 1982, vol.1, 236-7.
Translation: Martyn 2004, vol. 1, 301, lightly modified.
Other liturgical acts and ceremonies
Cult PlacesCult building - independent (church)
RelicsBodily relic - entire body
Protagonists in Cult and NarrativesEcclesiastics - monks/nuns/hermits
Source
Gregory's Register is a collection of some 854 of his letters as pope, collected into 14 books (each book representing an indictional year of his pontificate, from 1 September to 31 August) of varied length and deriving from the file-copies that were made in Rome and kept in the papal archive. The original copies survived into the 9th century, but were subsequently lost. From the late 8th century onwards, however, because of the exceptional stature that Gregory had by then attained, various collections were assembled from the original copies (the largest under Pope Hadrian I at the end of the 8th century), and these constitute the Register as we have it today.The Register does not contain all the letters that Gregory despatched as pope, since some whose text survives refer to others which are lost; but the collection we have is unique from the late antique period, and only matched in quantity and range of subjects by the registers of high-medieval popes. Recipients range from papal administrators, through prominent churchmen and aristocrats, to kings and the imperial family, and treat a wide variety of topics, from the mundane administrative affairs of the papal patrimony to deep theological and moral considerations.
For the cult of saints, there is much that is of interest in the letters, but two particular concentrations of evidence stand out. The first is a clutch of around a dozen letters that mention requests for relics from Rome, or that accompanied small personal relics as gifts to influential correspondents. The second concentration of evidence relates to the dedications of churches and other ecclesiastical institutions in southern Italy, Sicily and Sardinia. Because the papacy owned extensive estates in these regions, and exercised particular authority there, many of Gregory's letters mention churches and other ecclesiastical institutions by the name of the saint to whom they were dedicated, thereby providing us with a rich panorama of the spread of both local and imported saintly cults.
Gregory's Register has been the subject of two substantial critical editions: the first by Ewald and Hartmann for the Monumenta Germaniae Historica; the second by Dag Norberg for Corpus Christianorum. The numbering of the letters is often the same in both editions, but it can differ, because Norberg removed letters (and other passages) that appear to have been added at a later date to the original Register, assigning them instead to Appendices. We have used Norberg's numbering, which is that now generally used.
(Bryan Ward-Perkins)
Bibliography
Edition:Ewald, P. and L.M. Hartmann (eds), Gregorii I papae Registrum epistolarum, 2 vols. (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Epistolae I and II, Berlin 1891 and 1899).
Norberg, D., S. Gregorii Magni, Registrum epistularum. 2 vols. (Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 140-140A; Turnhout: Brepols, 1982).
English translation:
Martyn, J.R.C., The Letters of Gregory the Great, 3 vols. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2004).
Further Reading:
Neil, B., and Dal Santo, M. (eds.), A Companion to Gregory the Great (Leiden: Brill, 2013).
Frances Trzeciak
20/10/2018
| ID | Name | Name in Source | Identity | S00307 | Pancratius, martyr of Rome | Pancratius | Certain |
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