Saints of the Day & More

Pope St. Gregory the Great was an apostle of the English, one of the most important popes and influential writers of the Middle Ages. Gregory was the son of a Roman senator and entered the service of the State as a young man. But in 573 he sold his enormous properties, founding six monasteries in Sicily and a seventh in Rome, and giving generously to the poor. The next year he entered his own monastery of St. Andrew's on the Celian Hill as a monk and was distinguished for his austere life, which both filled him with nostalgia in later years and caused some of the ill-health which he suffered so constantly. Pope Benedict I, however, called him out of the monastery to become one of the seven deacons of Rome, and his successor, Pelagius II, made him apocrisiarius (ambassador) in Byzantium. After six years of distinguished service Gregory returned to Rome to become abbot of St. Andrew's, seemingly convinced that the future of Christianity lay with monasticism rather than with the d...

John's nickname comes from the famous treatise on asceticism written by John and entrusted to the abbot of Raithu, The Ladder of Paradise (Greek climax, which means stairs). His biographer, the monk Daniel Raithu Monastery, southwest Sinai, writes that John was born in Palestine and the age of six left the hometown to retire to a monastery in Sinai. There he received the monastic tonsure at four years of income and lived 19 years in community under the guidance of a holy old man, named Martyrdom. When the master died, John retired to a solitary cell on Mount Sinai, a few miles from the monastery, where he was down on Saturday and Sunday to participate in religious ceremonies with the other brothers. In the cell there was only a wooden cross, a table and a bench that served as chair and bed. Their only wealth were the books of Holy Scripture and the writings of the Fathers of the Church, including Pastoralis Regula of St. Gregory the Great, translated into Greek by a patriarch of An...

The only historical source on the life of St. Scholastica, sister of St. Benedict, is Chapters 33 and 34 of the second book of the Dialogues of St. Gregory the Great. The news, which added legendary enrich some simple and intense image of the saint. But Gregory was not interested in presenting a story full biography of St. Scholastica, but completing the internal profile of the father of Western monasticism. It seems that the birth year of the two holy matches: 480. Therefore, Benedict and Scholastica were probably twins, and if it were anagrafica, yes they were spiritually, since their lives were parallel to the death, in 547, 40 days away. Scholastica was born in Nursia very young and devoted himself to God, then followed his brother to San Benito Subiaco and Monte Cassino. In Piumarola, at the foot of the mountain, he established his monastery, as if humbly wanted to stop at the foot of the mountain, whose summit's brother had set his room. But despite being so close in place an...