Daily Martyrology for September 3

In 604, at Rome, St. Gregory the Great, pope and doctor of the church. Highly educated, he served for some years as a secular administrator. When his father died, he gave his family's property to the church, and in 574 became a monk in a monastery he had established in the family mansion on the Coelian Hill in Rome. In 578 he was made a deacon of Rome, and in 579 he was sent as diplomatic representative of the pope to Constantinople. He was elected pope in 590 while he was helping victims of a plague in Rome. He proved to be a skilled administrator and diplomat. He sent missionaries to England. His extensive writings, including the life of St. Benedict in his Dialogues, were widely read in the Middle Ages.

In the first century, St. Phoebe, whom Paul commends in the epistle to the Romans as “a deaconess of the church of Cenchrae”.

In 676, St. Aigulf, martyr. He was a monk of Fleury and then abbot of Lêrins.

In 1244, Blessed Guala of Brescia. Already a priest, he was recruited by St. Dominic. He later became bishop of Brescia at an especially troubled time in northern Italy.

In Nagasaki, in 1632, Blessed Antony Ixida and companions, martyrs. Antony was born of Catholic parents and became a Jesuit. He was repeatedly imprisoned and finally burned at the stake with five others.

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Our daily martyrology was written by Fr. Hugh Feiss, OSB. Copyright © 2008 by the Monastery of the Ascension, Jerome, ID 83338.