Today, the Return to Order Moment is honored to bring you two essays written by the founder of the international TFP Movement, Professor Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira. Both essays describe the virtues and actions of Popes named Gregory.

However, their names, their loyalty to the Catholic Faith, and the fact that both occupied the Throne of Saint Peter are all that these two men have in common. Four Hundred years separated them, and the problems that they faced were very different.

The first is Pope Gregory the First, usually known as Saint Gregory the Great.

Pope Saint Gregory the Great was so influential that fifteen subsequent popes took his name. Not all of them lived up to his example, but one in particular did. He was also canonized a saint, Gregory the Seventh.

Pope Saint Gregory the Seventh was born about the year 1015. He was Pope for twelve years – from 1073 to 1085.

Professor Plinio summed up his importance in the title of an essay that he wrote in 1972, Saint Gregory the Seventh, the Pope Par Excellence.

One quick note, in two places Professor Plinio refers to Pope Paul the Sixth, who was pope at the time this essay was written. Certainly, it takes little imagination to substitute Pope Francis’s name, for the situations that Professor Plinio describes still exist today.