Cyril with his disciples did not cease to give thanks to God on account of these things. The Romans, however, did not cease to go to him and interrogate him about all sorts of things, and seek from him a second and third explanation.
The Official Decree Authorizing Cyril’s Translations
Eleven years after Cyril’s death, the bishop of Rome solemnly endorsed the great missionary’s efforts to bring the Gospel to the Slavs by authorizing his liturgical texts. (From Pope John VIII’s Industriae tuae, AD 880)
We rightly praise the Slavonic letters invented by Cyril in which praises to God are set forth, and we order that the glories and deeds of Christ our Lord be told in that same language. Nor is it in any wise opposed to wholesome doctrine and faith to say Mass in that same Slavonic language, or to chant the holy Gospels or divine lessons from the Old and New Testaments duly translated and interpreted therein, or the other parts of the Divine Office: for He who created the three principal languages, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, also made the others for His praise and glory.
Medieval Leaders
The Catholic vision of life has always resisted the poison of secularism, or the tendency to reduce religion to a private, individual, interior experience in complete isolation from the “real life” of work, politics, and social life. As the great medieval theologian St. Thomas Aquinas would put it, “Grace does not replace nature, but perfects it”: every area of life that is truly human—political, economic, civic, literary, family, and such—is lifted up, elevated, and perfected by the grace of Christ.
By implication, the Catholic Church needs more than full congregations on Sunday mornings: she needs men and women to take the “salt” of the Gospel and season the professional and civic spheres of human life.
This was never truer than in the Middle Ages, a period that began with all of these areas in utter disarray. The robust civic infrastructure of the Roman Empire in Western Europe had collapsed during the barbarian invasions of the fourth century, and thereafter found itself ruled by men who had little interest in the promotion of literacy, peace and justice, and law and order. As Catholic missionaries took up the task of proclaiming the Gospel to the barbarian tribes of Western Europe, these missionaries had to do more than announce the Good News of Christ’s resurrection. They had to establish schools, teach literacy, and draft law codes—in short, they had to evangelize and civilize.
New nations had to be built on the rubble of the Roman Empire: nations with leaders who were strong and just, able to rule as Christ had ruled. In the absence of strong governments and just laws, the strong were able to oppress the weak, the wealthy to exploit the poor. Tyrannical warlords had to be subjugated; law codes had to be updated and enforced; and hospitals, orphanages, and other charitable institutions had to be built to care for the poor, the sick, and the desperate.
Even more, culture depends upon literacy, and the barbarians had had little use for books except as fuel for fires. Books had to be copied and collected into libraries, schools had to be rebuilt, and children taught to read and write, all in the hope that the vast storehouses of knowledge built up in the age of the Fathers would not vanish from history, but could be transmitted to future generations.
Without such patient work on the part of thousands of teachers, lawyers, kings, and parents—from the grandest emperor to the anonymous peasant farmer—the Dark Ages would never have ended. Yet by the thirteenth century Western Europe could boast of burgeoning universities, busy parliaments, and a solid civic infrastructure excelling anything the Roman Empire had ever known.
Those who built, revised, and reformed these institutions—those we will call leaders—came in many stripes. We will look at only a few: two Christian kings of France (Charlemagne and Louis IX); the quintessential schoolmaster Alcuin of York; Gregory, the pope who so revolutionized the papal office that he is known as the “first medieval pope”; and Elizabeth of Hungary, whose private work on behalf of the poor and sick inspired countless generations after her.
St. Gregory the Great (540–604)
Gregory lived his whole life in the shadow of intense suffering. Rome, his birthplace, was sacked by barbarians when he was only six years old, and barbarian raids around the Italian countryside brought throngs of dirt-poor refugees flooding into Rome, carrying with them a plague that wiped out a third of the region’s population. Gregory was himself constantly sick from fever, indigestion, and gout, and in his later years claimed that his only consolation was the hope that death might come soon.
Yet Gregory knew that difficult times call for heroic activity. His family’s noble background (his father was a senator) marked him out for a brilliant political career, but after a brief stint as Rome’s governor he renounced public office and entered a monastery, where he spent what he later called “the happiest years” of his life. When the reigning pope was struck down by the plague, however, the city’s populace elected Gregory pope against his will, disrupting his plans to flee the city and intercepting his letter of refusal. (Forcible ordinations were not unusual in this period, as odd as they sound to modern ears.)
As the first pope from a monastic background, Gregory brought an intense spirituality to that office. It was Gregory who first conceived of a global plan of spreading the Gospel to the empire’s barbarian conquerors, sending St. Augustine of Canterbury, the prior of his former monastery, to England as the head of a mission team. He organized the first universal system of relief for the poor in Rome, harvesting produce from the Church’s lands and sending teams patrolling the streets to distribute prepared food to the indigent refugees.
Gregory’s revisions to the Mass (later incorporated into the Gregorian Sacramentary) and fondness for liturgical chant (later known as Gregorian chant) so influenced the universal Church that he became known as the “father of Christian worship.” Meanwhile, his immense corpus of writings (854 letters survive!) inevitably led to his being named a Doctor of the Church. Perhaps his most influential writing was the only contemporaneous biography of St. Benedict, a monk whose life he desired to imitate.
Gregory is of significant historical importance because of his westward reorientation of European Christianity. With the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, most Christians in the West continued to look to the East for their inspiration, where a thriving and materially successful Roman Empire still flourished in Byzantium. Having spent eight years as the papal ambassador to Constantinople, where his mission of securing military aid for Rome from the emperor proved fruitless, Gregory returned to the West somewhat disillusioned with the great Eastern hope.
If Western Christianity were to survive, it had to find its own independent basis, and Rome was as good a basis as any other. (His successors would also look to the great Frankish kings, such as Charlemagne, for military aid.) Gregory worked hard, therefore, to elevate the significance of Rome in the West, encouraging churches throughout Western Europe—including those in mission lands—to take their cues from Rome rather than Constantinople.
He did not hesitate to venture even into political affairs to protect the city of Rome: When the political offices of Rome fell vacant as a result of the endless wars and violence in the region, Gregory himself—he had, after all, once been governor!—took charge of the city’s defenses, carried out diplomacy, maintained relief for the poor, and established treaties with the barbarian tribes in the countryside.
It was thanks to Gregory’s tireless efforts that Rome, the Eternal
