St. Gregory of Narek (February 27th)

Of the relatively few Saints commemorated this Week:

Feb. 23rd – St. Polycarp, Bishop and Martyr

Feb. 27th – St. Gregory of Narek, Abbot and Doctor of the Church

I’ve chosen to write about St. Gregory of Narek a still rather obscure saint to most of us in the Catholic Church.  However, he is incredibly important to Armenian Christians and in recent decades to both St. John Paul II to Pope Francis, to the point that the Vatican found a way to honor this bishop and mystic in the Catholic Church by making his feast day an optional memorial in the General Roman Calendar.

So who was St. Gregory of Narek?  

He was born between 945-951 A.D. in the Armenian Kingdom of Vaspurakan centered around Lake Van in the mountainous region of today’s eastern Turkey.  His father Khosrov Andzevatsi, was a relative to the Artsruni royal family, which ruled the kingdom at the time.  

Note here that St. Gregory’s story is  not unlike that of St. Francis Xavier or St. Charles Borromeo in this regard, both of whom were also quite “well born” into noble houses in Kingdoms or Duchies of their time, but whose importance has long since been subsumed by time:  

St. Francis Xavier’s father had been the president of the Council of Advisors to the King of the Basque Kingdom of Navarre, which in his  lifetime was invaded and absorbed into the ascending Kingdom of Spain.  St. Charles Borromeo was born into one of  the richest families in Lombardy / Duchy of Milan, his mother was actually a Medici and her brother (his uncle) a Pope.   Yet, he came to be the last in the Borromeo line, becoming a saint, in part because as Bishop of Milan he spent his family’s fortune to save the people of Milan during a famine.  

In the case of St. Gregory of Narek there’s next to nothing left of the Armenian Christian kingdom of  Vaspurakan where he was born.  Even the Monastery of Narek where he had been interred and venerated was demolished in the early 20th Century during the Armenian Genocide and a mosque was built on top of its ruins.

That said, in his lifetime and in the centuries that followed up until today, the Marian spirituality of St. Gregory of Narek became very important in his part of the Christian world and increasingly noted in the Catholic Church, in the first place by St. John Paul II, who referred to him in his Encyclical Redemptoris Mater (Mother of the Redeemer).

St. Gregory of Narek’s legacy becomes a reminder that “though the mountains may fall (and kingdoms fall to dust)” that “the love of the Lord remains.”  Indeed, in his own life, St. Gregory held the view that we are truly saved only by our faith and finally simply by God’s grace, ideas that came to fore centuries later in the West during the Protestant Reformation, but came to him through his reflection on Christ, on his own life and his own place in it, thousands of miles and many centuries distant from when  Martin Luther walked the earth in Germany of the 1500s.

St. Gregory of Narek pray for us!