Pope Gregory II

Pope Saint Gregory II was pope from 19 May 715 to his death on 11 February 731 in succession to Pope Constantine. Having, it is said, bought off the Lombards for thirty pounds of gold after Charles Martel refused his call for aid, he used the tranquillity thus obtained for vigorous missionary efforts among the Germanic tribes, and for strengthening the papal authority in the churches of Britain and Ireland. By excommunicating the Byzantine emperor Leo III the Isaurian in the course of the iconoclastic controversy of the Eastern Empire, he prepared the way for a long series of revolts and civil wars that tended greatly to the establishment of the temporal power of the popes. His public letter to the Emperor denied the Imperial right to interfere in matters of doctrine, the central tenet of Caesaropapism.

The name he selected was significant, expressing his intention to follow in the policies of Gregory the Great

He died in 731, and subsequently attained the honour of canonization. The day that Gregory is remembered in the "Martyrology" seems to be any one of 11 February, 13 February, and 28 February.

Gregory II was an alleged collateral ancestor to the Roman Savelli family, according to a 15th-century chronicler, but this is undocumented and very likely unreliable. The same was said of the seventh-century Pope Benedict II, but nothing certain is known about a kinship between the two of them.

References

• "Pope St. Gregory II" in the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia.
• from the 9th edition (1880) of an unnamed encyclopedia

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