St. Gregory the Great

Who they were

Gregory was Prefect of Rome, the city's highest civil office, before he was forty, and walked away from it: he sold the family estates, founded monasteries, and became a monk, which he called the happiest chapter of his life. Rome had other plans. Drafted into papal service and then, in the plague year 590, elected pope by acclamation, having tried to flee the city, he governed for fourteen years that reorganized the Western Church.

He fed Rome from the Church's granaries when the empire could not, negotiated with Lombard armies himself, and sent Augustine of Canterbury to evangelize England on the strength of a pun about Angle slave boys, not Angles but angels. He wrote the Pastoral Rule that trained a millennium of bishops, and the Dialogues that preserved the stories of St. Benedict and St. Scholastica. The chant bearing his name he did not compose, but his liturgical reforms earned the attribution and musicians keep him anyway. His self chosen papal title outlived him by design: servant of the servants of God, which popes sign to this day.

Why people turn to St. Gregory the Great

Pastors, teachers, and everyone drafted into leadership they did not seek. Church musicians by fourteen centuries of custom. And his plague year papacy gives him the old patronage against epidemics.

How to ask their intercession

For your pastor by name, since the author of the Pastoral Rule is the natural intercessor, and before accepting the role you did not want.