To Dominicus, Bishop of Carthage, on Monks Who Leave Their Monastery

Gregory to Dominicus, bishop of Carthage. We believe that your fraternity attends to the care of monasteries with a pastor’s watchfulness. Even so, we think it necessary to inform you of what we have learned about a monastery in the province of Africa. Now the abbot Cumquodeus, who carries this letter, complains that whenever he wishes to hold the monks over whom he presides under the discipline of the rule, they at once leave the monastery and are allowed to wander wherever they like. Since this is altogether ruinous to themselves and also sets others an example of perdition, we urge your fraternity, if it is so, to bring the church’s censure to bear on them and to hold them back by fitting punishment from such plain presumption. Bring them to obedience by wholesome measures, bending their proud minds to the yoke of discipline, so that this correction may call back from guilt others whom their example might have provoked to the same offense, and may teach them to obey their superiors, as is right. But since he tells us that wandering monks are defended by some bishops, let your fraternity give careful attention to this, and by your threats hold those bishops back in every way from defending them. The month of July, in the fifteenth indiction. [a]