The Origins of St. Gregory’s, Paris
St. Gregory’s was a small college belonging to the English secular clergy founded at Paris in the late seventeenth century. Its main purpose was to enable suitable ecclesiastics who had completed their training at Douai or the other colleges abroad to pursue advanced studies at the Sorbonne before working on the mission in England. Its founders hoped it would serve to produce a corps of highly qualified men to fill the leading administrative and teaching posts in the Catholic Church in England. It survived until 1786 when financial difficulties forced it to close—temporarily, as was at first thought. During the Revolution it suffered the fate of the other English Catholic institutions in France, and it never, in fact, reopened. Among the documents that have survived from its archives is a Register Book covering the whole period of its existence from its first beginnings in 1667 until it closed down over a century later. This Register Book, which records the arrival and departure of students, the stages in their university career, their promotion to holy orders, deaths occurring at the college, and occasional memoranda of events affecting the life of the community, was edited for the Catholic Record Society in 1917 by the late Monsignor Edwin Burton.