IN THE EYE OF THE STORM A Biography of Gregory the Great By SIGRID GRABNER

Description

Veteran writer Sigrid Grabner tells the dramatic story of Pope Gregory 1-a poor monk known now to history as St. Gregory the Great. Born to a noble family and trained in Roman law, Gregory had been prefect of the city of Rome as a young man but gave up his power to walk in the footsteps of St. Benedict. Everything changed in a flash when, in  590, he was raised, against his will, to the highest office of Christendom and found himself, as he wrote to one friend, “in the eye of a storm”, at the helm of an “old and rotten ship”, with the waves groaning around him. He thought he was not up to the job. But he was wrong. Grabner’s vivid narrative of the life of Gregory the Great reads more like a novel, evoking the landscape of early medieval Italy with humanity and realism. It brings us face to face with a man who, for all his weakness, became an instrument in the hand of God and let himself be made great. Paper.