Kim Gentes

Pastoral Care is an ancient volume written by Pope Gregory the Great in 591AD. It was written to instruct pastors on the details of their office, warnings to those entering its service and extensive instructions on how to administer spiritual care to parishioners. The primary content of the book is a systematic listing of methodologies for how to evaluate and speak to Christians under the pastoral care of the reader. The methodologies, called admonishments,  contain two basic components in each. First, each admonishment contains a paradoxical evaluation of two kinds of people. These are categorizations of the types of people a pastor will encounter. While they are fairly simplistic in name, it is their simplicity that makes them especially effective as diagnostic tools.  Each admonishment begins with a listing of the two paradoxical types of people that will be dealt with. A pastor can use those types to help him find (within Gregory’s extensive treatise) and diagnose the kind of person he is trying to help.  Second, each admonishment also contains a specific and detailed account of how to treat each person described therein. Especially clear is the assumption that Gregory feels his coverage of the subject as a whole should be sufficient for almost any situation, and he approaches it is an analogous manner to a physician, employing the metaphor extensively, and acting as a instructor to spiritual physicians.

One topic which Gregory deals with that I was particularly impressed by was his understanding of giving. He states it this way:

For when we administer necessities to the needy, we give them what is their own, not what is ours; we pay a debt of justice, rather than do a work of mercy..[1]

His discourse on giving is one of the most extraordinary I have seen. Though not without objectionable points, he perfectly applies a surgical knife to misguided thought about giving when he states:

"[one] gives of his bread to an indigent sinner, not because he is a sinner, but because he is a man. In doing so one actually nourishes a righteous beggar, not a sinner, for he loves in him not his sin but his nature." [2]

Though the work is vastly important and helpful to the pastoral office, it is not without its questionable suggestions:

The married must be admonished to bear in mind that they are united in wedlock for the purpose of procreation, and when they abandon themselves to immoderate intercourse, they transfer the occasion of procreation to the service of pleasure. Let them realise that though they do not then pass beyond the bounds of wedlock, yet in wedlock they exceed its rights. Wherefore, it is necessary that they should efface by frequent prayer what they befoul in the fair form of intercourse by the admixture  of pleasure.[3]

Sadly, Gregory’s pre-medieval understanding of the marriage bed will only serve  as a template to plunge the church and its leadership into 1300 years of further angst and castigation against sexual fulfillment through marriage in specific, and anything sexual in general.

Product Link : Ancient Christian Writers - The Works Of The Fathers In Translation - St Gregory The Great: Pastoral Care

 
Review by Kim Gentes

[1]Johannes Quasten, “St Gregory The Great: Pastoral Care” in Ancient Christian Writers - The Works Of The Fathers In Translation, translated Henry Davis, SJ (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1950), Pg 159
[2]Ibid., Pg 155
[3]Ibid., Pg 188