GREGORY OF AGRIGENTO

Saint Gregory was the bishop of the ancient city Agrigento, in southern Sicily. His ministry took place during the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian II (685-711) at the end of the 7th century. His commentary of the biblical book of Ecclesiastes in ten books has been preserved. In popular piety, Saint Gregory was revered as the “new Nicholas the Wonderworker”, with an abundance of signs and wonders.

Researchers tell us that traces of the veneration of Saint Gregory in the Orthodox East date back to the 9th century, while he was unknown in the West. His name was added to the calendars only under the Catholic theologian and historian Cardinal Cesare Baronius (1538-1607). Despite its location south of the Apennine Peninsula, Sicily was for many centuries under the influence of the Byzantine emperors and the Church, and therefore the Orthodox rightly perceived the Sicilian saints as part of their heritage. Therefore, unlike many ancient saints of the Christian West, who were not included in the Eastern menologions, the names of a significant number of Sicilian saints are included in the Orthodox liturgical calendars.

In the letters of the Holy Roman Pope Gregory the Great (540-604) we find evidence that a certain Bishop Gregory of Agrigento was judged by a church council in Rome for unworthy behavior. Apparently, subsequent generations mistakenly identified the two Sicilian bishops, an unworthy one and a saint, who bore the same name. Perhaps this is why Saint Gregory of was forgotten in his homeland, but venerated as a saint in Orthodoxy.

The era of St. Gregory was a time of Monothelite controversies. The essence of them was that the Byzantine emperors sought to attract to their side the Monophysites who had broken away from the unity of the Church with the help of compromise formulas in the doctrine of the unity of the divine and human natures in Christ. The Arab conquests had already torn Egypt and Syria away from the Christian Empire, where the Christian majority consisted of precisely those to whom this policy was addressed. According to his life, Gregory participated in one of the councils that condemned this, essentially modernist for that time, compromise, when at the cost of concessions in dogmas, those in power sought to restore unity.

In such circumstances, the saint, as his life tells us, suffered from slander. Envious clerics accused him of cohabiting with a harlot. The woman publicly accused the saint of sin and shuddered with fits of rage. Seeing her obvious frenzy, the slanderers resorted to accusing Gregory of witchcraft. Unable to shake his orthodoxy, they resorted to accusations of moral impurity. After a period of severe trials that befell Gregory, which are described in detail in the life, God Himself, in signs and miracles, defended the honor of his faithful servant.

In the era of Soviet anti-religious policy and the total marginalization of the Church, the Russian bishop emeritus Barnabas Belyaev (1887-1963) translated the life of St. Gregory into modern language and gave it the form of a criminal novel. This is a very instructive example of a clear and sensible contextualization of the lives and virtues of saints. The literary work of Bishop Barnabas is read in one breath. Although it does not contain theological data, once you read it, Saint Gregory of Sicily is simply impossible to forget.