Letter 4

From: Theudelinda, Queen of the Lombards To: Pope Gregory the Great Date: ~596 AD Context: Theudelinda thanks Gregory for his writings and support — one of the few surviving letters from a Lombard royal to the papal see. Theudelinda, queen, to the most blessed and holy Gregory, bishop of Rome. Your letters are a source of more strength to me than you may know. To be a Catholic queen in an Arian court is a position that requires a certain kind of loneliness — the loneliness of believing something that the people around you do not share, and of not being free to speak about it as openly as you would wish. Your correspondence gives me a connection to the tradition I belong to that would otherwise be very thin. I read your letters not once but many times, and I share them with those of my household who are already Catholic and with those who are not yet but who seem to be moving toward it. I have received the copies of your writings with great joy. The Dialogues especially — the stories of the Italian saints — have been read and discussed here with an interest I had not anticipated. Several of the Lombard nobles who have been most resistant to any engagement with Catholic ideas have found themselves drawn in. Stories work differently than arguments. I thought you should know. The relics are now installed in the chapel I am building. Please pray that this building will be used for the purposes you and I both intend. Your daughter in Christ, Theudelinda