A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. As the crowd pressed upon Jesus to hear the word of god, Jesus saw two boats moored by the side of the lake. The fishermen had disembarked and were washing their nets. Jesus got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, that's Simon Peter, of course, and asked him to pull out a short distance from the shore. Then remaining seated, Jesus continued to teach the crowds from the boat.
When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, put out into the deep water and lower your nets for a catch. Simon answered, master, we have been hard at it all night long and have caught nothing. But if you say so, I will lower the nets. Upon doing it, they caught such a great number of fish that their nets were at the breaking point. They signaled to their mates in the other boat to come over and help.
They came, and together, they filled two boats until the boats nearly sank. Very poor seamanship. Well, at the sight of all of this, Simon Peter fell upon his knees before Jesus saying, leave me, Lord. I am a sinful man. For indeed amazement at the catch they had made ceased Peter and all his shipmates as well as James and John, Zebedee's sons, who were partners with Simon.
And then Jesus said to Simon, do not be afraid. From now on, you will be catching men. With that, they brought their boats to land, left everything, and became the followers of Jesus. And this is the gospel of the lord. Praise The name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen.
Today, we are celebrating the feast of Saint Gregory the great. He's called the great because that's what history has deigned to call him, and he deserves every bit of it. He was born roughly a hundred years after Augustine died and died about 06/2004, around that time, if I call it correct. He was born, I think, 05/1940. Now this is important because you have four great doctors of the the Western church, of the Latin church, and three of them are contemporaries.
That is Ambrose up in he was a Roman up in Milan. Then you have Augustine who was converted. Well, at least he was baptized by Saint Ambrose. And then over way over in Nazareth, in Israel, in the Holy Land, we have Saint Jerome who was exactly a contemporary of Augustine. They are three of the great fathers of the western church, of the Latin church.
And this man's the fourth one, Gregory the great, one hundred years about after August. He was born. I mean, he flourished in the in the sick in the sixteenth century. He died in 06/2004. Well, almost any any avenue, any area of human interest having to do with state or church, the invasion of the vandals from the North, the Lombards, if it has to do with church discipline, if it has to do with the great the system was already growing between the East and the Western churches, the growth of the papacy.
Gregory was at the top of all of this. And this fact is a is a discovery, a rediscovery of the twentieth century. Now of all of this, I do well, I do know this a little bit. For example, when you read Saint Thomas Aquinas, thirteenth century, one of the men he quotes most often is Gregory the great, Pope Gregory. Along with Augustine, with Ambrose, and Saint Jerome, all during the middle ages, Gregory was the great authority of the church and especially as regards morals or moral theology and the bible.
So it's very difficult well, practically impossible to exaggerate this man's importance just as you can say the same about men like Jerome and Augustine. And in my humble opinion, not that to that to that extent about Ambrose. But when you talk about saint Jerome who gave us the vulgar, that is the Latin bible, that was used continuously from that day until this day and was the official bible of the Roman Catholic church, how can you begin to weigh the influence of a man who gave us that translation in Latin? Then you have Augustine from Hippo who became the the great theologian of the Western church right down to the present day. And while it's true that his that as that with the coming of the twelfth and the thirteenth century with there was a whole new wave, I say, of Catholic thought.
Nevertheless, it it it didn't it did not destroy or eliminate Saint Augustine. Saint Augustine is still very much with us. And here you have another man who who is not so prominent. And yet in my little old life, this man played a big role, just as Leo the thirteenth in that encyclical of his own labor. When I went to Saint Charles, which was then in existence, we we had seminaries in those days, the first thing that I was introduced to was to Gregorian chant.
Well, I didn't know a thing about. Was absolutely a tabula rasa as far as art is concerned. That's one thing I did not cultivate. I was too busy with more important things. But know this will bore you a bit, but to me, it's it's extremely personal and very cherished.
Because when I went to Saint Charles in 1923, it's not that I was just introduced to the chant. I was to the Gregorian chant because that thing has been thrown all over the world. I was introduced to it by a man who came out of Salem, who had been a student of Dom Macaro, who had been very close to Dom Gueranger with the restoration of the liturgy, the Roman liturgy into France, and to a school at Salim that was devoting monks there were devoting their lives, I mean their whole lives, to try to reconstruct the Latin chants of the church based upon Saint Gregory the Great. They'd gone all through Europe collecting manuscripts, photographing them, bringing them back, collating them, working them up, And finally, we got the great Lee Berries Wallace, as it's called, the ordinary book. And now so that this particular activity of Gregory the Great, that is the liturgy of the church, which much of which he created, much of it, but that we use today, the curiae, which is alternated between people and priests or should be, that is Gregory's introduction.
And just as he insisted upon the importance of the homily, the word of god being given to the people, so he insisted upon that word of god being enhanced. Notice enhanced, not destroyed or disfigured, but enhanced by the singing of the faith. And so this was not a big thing in his life, but in my life, it's my main contact with Gregory the Great. Now much of this is water over the dam. I realize that.
But this man stood in my life as representing a certain artistic or aesthetic approach to having art, music, the human voice, enhancing worship. Enhancing it. Because if you can't enhance it, forget it. And so today, as we pay tribute to this great man and really, you know, he started out as being a prefect of Rome. Of course, that was no longer the actual seat of empire, but he was the main wheel in Rome and a very wealthy man.
His whole family given two popes. He came from a very patrician family. And then one day after his father's death, he gave it all up. Established, I don't know how many monasteries on on the order of Saint Benedict on on his land of the states in Sicily and Naples and Rome up in Lombardy, and became a very hard living monk. Now as I've mentioned many times, at that in those days, when you did this, it meant that you really did renounce the world and and lived a very severe, physically severe life.
No compromises. Of course, it it it an injured damaged his health for life. He only lived six about six to be a little over 60 years old. But that's the way it was. He was called.
He didn't want it. He was called to be to be ordained a priest, and finally, he was called to be the pope. And he had great conflicts with the West with the East because there there you had, of course, the we don't know exactly when it began, but you had this chasm. Well, that that's too strong a word at this time. But there was this breaking apart between the eastern church in Constantinople, which, of course, was a magnificent city compared to Rome at this time, and the the western church headed up by the pope of Rome.
Well, these things are vast, as I say, I and upon these things rest his greatness. But in my little old life, my contacts were were were through this chant, through the chant that bears his name. He didn't invent it at all, but he did he did a great deal to codify it, to bring it together, and to have the people use it, the people use it so that with one voice with one voice, the community could take the word of god, which he cherished profoundly, and enhance it with the beauty of the god given voice to make it more have more meaning for everybody concerned that their own worship, their own personal worship, which you cannot eliminate, which is essential when the chips are down, which is the thing that counts, that in this community worship, where the community is joined together as with one voice in this common plain song, as we call it, they could worship god better as individual persons to which we are each one of us called. In the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit. Amen.