Saint Gregory of Utrecht
Today in the Orthodox Church we commemorate another continental Western missionary saint among the Frisians and Saxons, Saint Gregory of Utrecht. Gregory was a friend and disciple of our much-beloved English Saint Boniface, and accompanied Boniface on his third journey to Rome.
The grandson of a Frankish noblewoman named Addula, the Abbess at the Benedictine house in Pfalzel, and the son of her son Alperich and Saint Wastrada, Gregory spent his early years there and learned about the Scriptures and Holy Fathers in the same town. When Saint Boniface passed through Pfalzel, he stayed at the Benedictine house, and the teenage Gregory was called upon to read from Holy Writ at mealtimes. After he had done, Saint Boniface expounded to him the inward meaning of the texts and their bearing upon the ascetic life. The private counsels of holy father Boniface apparently moved Gregory so deeply that he begged to be allowed to accompany him – and succeeded in his intention through firmness of will. Gregory shared in Saint Boniface’s toils, trials and setbacks, and even shared some of his holy starets’s inward struggles. He even accompanied Boniface on his third trip to Rome in 738, and brought back with him from there many holy books for his library.
Holy Hierarch Willibrord reposed in the Lord in 744, and left no successor to his see in Utrecht; Boniface was left to act as an interim administrator for the new diocæse. He appointed his comrade Gregory as Abbot of Saint Martin’s Abbey in Utrecht in 750, which had been founded by the holy hierarch. Another close companion of Boniface, Saint Éoban, was appointed Bishop of Utrecht in 753 – one year before his and his master’s martyrdoms in Dokkum at the hands of the heathen. After Boniface’s death, all of the duties of the bishop of Utrecht fell to the trusted Abbot Gregory; for this reason he is sometimes called ‘Bishop’ even though formally he was never consecrated.
Under Abbot Gregory, with his love of learning and his respect for books, Saint Martin’s Abbey became a hub of scholarship and a beacon of classical education. The school was, as could be seen, not only for the Franks but also for Frisians, Saxons, Bavarians and Swabians. Late in Abbot Gregory’s life, a bright and devoted young Frisian monk named Liudgar appeared in the abbey school. Gregory was so impressed with Liudgar’s love of learning that he made the monk a teacher there. Saint Liudgar would later be the one to write the Vita of Saint Gregory of Utrecht; in it he describes some of Saint Gregory’s virtues. Gregory is therein described as not only devoted to study of holy things, but also soberly ascetic, contemptuous of worldly riches, generous to the poor, kind and forgiving.
Late in his life, Abbot Gregory was afflicted with a palsy that immobilised first the left side of his body and then the whole of it. As he approached his worldly end on the twenty-fifth of August, 770, he asked his brothers to bear him into the church, which is where he reposed in the Lord. For the most part his wonder-working relics were kept at Utrecht, though some were moved to his saintly mother’s home in Susteren. Holy Father Gregory, pray to God for us!
Domkerk Sint-Maartens, Utrecht
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