Time For Great Catholics To Step Up

3 September 2026  2 Corinthians 4:1-2,5-7

Memorial of St. Gregory the Great, Pope and Doctor of the Church

“For we do not preach ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake.”  (2 Corinthians 4:5)   

So, what made Gregory so Great?  

Well, for one thing, he did a lot for the city of Rome during the Plague of Justinian, which started in Egypt in A.D. 541, raged over Europe and the Middle east until 549, and recurred in waves for the next 200 years. It was the first visitation of bubonic plage in Europe, and killed millions – about 20-40% of the people died wherever it flared up. In the 570s as city prefect, and from 590-604 as pope, Gregory undertook a three-fold response to the epidemic – religious, charitable, and administrative, and the memory of Gregory’s initiatives are with us to this day.

All Great Catholics, it seems, become great the same way – intense prayer and devotion, vigorous and vocal defense of Catholic teaching, and consistent and meaningful help to the suffering and the poor.

In a penitential procession across the city, in which the participants sang the seven penitential psalms (Psalms 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, 143) Gregory had a vision of the Archangel Michael sheathing his sword over the mausoluem of emperor Hadrian, which he took as a sign that the plague would soon end. To this day, the mausoleum of Hadrian is  known as the Castel Sant’Angelo.

Gregory also urged the people to practice small, but frequent devotions and prayers, among them saying “God bless you” to anyone who sneezed, a little prayer that hundreds of millions of people still pray daily. Gregory spent lavishly to feed, clothe and house suffering Romans, and since the Roman Senate was slipping quickly into irrelevance, Gregory had the papacy step in to manage many civil affairs.

This wasn’t the first time the Church’s generosity got people’s attention. It happened in a similar fashion during the 2nd century Antonine Plague, and in the third century Plague of Cyprian, creating the conditions that led to the conversion of Constantine and the Roman government to Christianity. All the popes who are called “The Great” followed the same pattern. Leo the Great talked Attila the Hun into leaving Italy, and stood fast against distortions of the Church’s teaching about Jesus, making sure His life remained accessible to us. John Paul the Great worked deftly behind the scenes, creating the conditions for the fall of the Soviet Union, and the end of communism in Europe. He also protected Catholic moral teaching in a time when many churches were watering it down, and, like the Roman Senate in Gregory’s time, hastening their slide into irrelevance.

All Great Catholics, it seems, become great the same way – intense prayer and devotion, vigorous and vocal defense of Catholic teaching, and consistent and meaningful help to the suffering and the poor.

“For we do not preach ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake” (2 Corinthians 4:5). We have recently been through an epidemic, and many surveys are indicating that as many as 40% of high school students feel desolate and hopeless at some point every day. These are also days when more people are reaching for Bibles, and hoping there is something in those pages that they – and their generation – have overlooked. It seems to be precisely the time for Great Catholics to step up, the kind of times that make Great Catholics great.