No matter the stage, the career of Saint Gregory the Great was marked consistently by excellence. Appointed Prefect of Rome around the age of thirty, Gregory forsook his worldly success in favor of monastic silence and communion with God, establishing at his ancestral home the Monastery of St. Andrew. There, in the words of Pope Benedict XVI, he lived a "life of permanent dialogue with the Lord in listening to his word." Providentially, Gregory was called in turn to leave the monastery for the See of Peter; there, his deep understanding of the Divine Word stood him in excellent stead-perhaps nowhere more tangibly than in his preaching. Selected from his work of forty homilies on the Gospels ( Homilia XL in Evangelia ) and translated by Nora Burke, Saint Gregory's Parables of the Gospel comprises an even dozen sermons on the parables of the Hidden Treasure; the Laborers in the Vineyard; the Marriage Feast; the Ten Virgins; the Talents; the Sower; the Great Harvest; the Barren Fig Tree; the Great Banquet; the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin; the Rich Man and Lazarus; and the Good Shepherd.