GREGORY I (Gregory the Great) Sylvester Hassell Gregory I was Pope from A.D. 590 to 604. He is one of the four doctors of the Latin Church—Ambrose, Augustine and Jerome being the other three. He was a Semi-Augustinian, excessively superstitious, monastic, ritualistic and hierarchical, hostile to secular learning, persecuted the Donatists in Africa, and was the father of medieval papacy, of the practical doctrine of purgatory and meritorious masses; he advocated the atoning value of good works, and furnished a basis for the later system of works of supererogation.
He sought to make converts, first by preaching, and if that failed, by bribery or imprisonment and torture. He applauded and flattered the centurion Phocas, a monster of vice and cruelty, who rebelled against, and atrociously slew the Roman Emperor Maurice and his wife and eight children, and who usurped the throne.
In 597 he sent out Augustine, a zealous and intolerant and self-sufficient monk, with forty followers, to convert the heathen Saxons in England to Roman Catholicism—the first strictly foreign mission, of the modern style, ever under-taken; and, as England was the field of this mission, so England has appropriately become the chief mother of nineteenth-century missions of the same character. In about a year three British kings and ten thousand of their subjects were baptized—many scandalous stories being told of these pretended conversions and baptisms; the old Pagan temples were consecrated by being sprinkled with holy water, and by having the saints relics put in place of the idols; and the old heathen festivals, such as Yule and Easter, were trans-formed into so-called Christian festivities. In such measures of compromise and accommodation, as well as in centralized power and unflagging perseverance, Papal Rome imitated Imperial Rome; and, using even greatly superior worldly wisdom and skill, she has achieved a natural success far more extensive and enduring than that ever attained by the Caesars or their political successors. The daughters of Papal Rome attain similar success just in proportion as they adopt similar measures of corrupting accommodation to the principles and practices of the world.” (Hassell’s History ppg 409, 410)
Sylvester Hassell Gregory was the first to make practical Origen’s and Augustine’s doctrine of purgatorial fire after death, and taught that the sufferings of Christians consigned to purgatory could be mitigated and shortened by the prayers, alms, masses, and other services of their surviving friends. He taught that each celebration of the communion was a new sacrifice, having new virtue for the atonement of sin.” (Hassell)