Feast day: January 9

St. Adrian of Canterbury

Abbot · d. 710

Patron of Teachers, students

A North African scholar who twice refused to be made Archbishop of Canterbury, then crossed Europe to run its abbey school — training a generation of England's bishops.

Adrian was an African by birth, probably from the Roman provinces of North Africa, and had become abbot of a monastery near Naples while still a young man. When the see of Canterbury fell vacant, Pope Vitalian twice offered him the archbishopric; twice Adrian declined as unworthy, and on the second occasion proposed instead a learned Greek monk, Theodore of Tarsus.

The Pope agreed on one condition: that Adrian accompany Theodore to England and assist him in governing the Church there. They set out in 668, though Adrian was detained two years in Gaul on suspicion of carrying secret imperial messages. When at last he reached Canterbury, Theodore made him abbot of the monastery of Sts. Peter and Paul, later known as St Augustine's.

There Adrian's true vocation flowered. A master of Scripture, theology, Latin and Greek, Roman law, and even astronomy and the natural sciences, he turned the school of Canterbury into the foremost centre of learning in the British Isles. The historian Bede records that some of his pupils, still living in Bede's own day, knew Latin and Greek as well as their native tongue.

Adrian governed his monastery and its school for nearly forty years, dying in 710. The schools he helped found across England seeded the remarkable flowering of Anglo-Saxon scholarship that would in time produce Bede himself.

He turned down the highest post in the English Church twice, preferring to teach Greek, Latin, and Scripture to students who came from across Britain.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/01160a.htm