Pastoral Rule, Dialogues & Letters 463

Gregory to Sabinianus, bishop of Zara. If you had studied with careful consideration to weigh the rule of ecclesiastical administration and the order of ancient custom, neither would any fault of unlawful presumption have crept upon you, nor would others have incurred peril by occasion of your sin. And so it is not doubtful that you had come to know that, when certain things had reached us concerning Maximus which not lightly impeded his advancement to the priesthood, our consent was not given in his person, nor had we wished him to attain to that which he was striving after, before worthy satisfaction should be forthcoming concerning those things which had been alleged.

Since you too ought by all means to have observed this, it came to pass instead that the aforesaid Maximus, seizing the episcopate in the greed of a blinded mind, incautiously bent you to his own will against our prohibition. But lest even then the matters which had been reported to us should remain uninvestigated, he was summoned by our letters to come here. And since he put off coming out of a perverse zeal, we took care to admonish him in repeated letters under the ban of communion, that he should hasten to come to us for his own purification, setting aside all excuse; but he chose rather to succumb to excommunication than to show obedience. Whence it came about that the perversity of his own mind involved others also along with him — a thing wicked to say — in its own ruin.

But now, since we have learned that you dissent from his wickedness, we exhort you by the present writings that you neither communicate with him nor make mention of his name amid the sacred solemnities of the Mass, so that it may profit your soul, even though late, to have parted from him; and to this end, that you do not delay to come to us with all delay removed, but that you hasten to bring with you also other bishops and other religious men, such as you are able: so that, the case being more subtly examined, both your absolution — if the matter shall require it — may fittingly and becomingly be granted, and those who have fallen into the sin of the same rashness may, by the aid of blessed Peter the prince of the Apostles, be recalled to the way of salvation by a dispensation pleasing to Christ.

But let every bishop or religious man who shall come to us know that he will suffer no prejudice or injustice; but that, the truth being inwardly known, those things shall be ordered which are pleasing to our Redeemer; so that from this our very dispensation, with the Lord's favour, it may appear to all that we are moved not by any private hatred against anyone, but by zeal for God and by the balance of ecclesiastical order.