Feast day: May 27
St. Augustine of Canterbury
Roman monk sent by Pope Gregory the Great to evangelize Anglo-Saxon England; he became the first Archbishop of Canterbury.
Augustine was a Roman monk, prior of the monastery of St. Andrew on the Caelian Hill in Rome, when Pope St. Gregory the Great chose him in 595 to lead a mission to the pagan Anglo-Saxons of Britain — an island once Christian under Roman rule, but largely reverted to heathenism after the Saxon conquest.
Augustine set out with about forty monks. So daunting were the reports of the fierce and unknown English that the band faltered partway, and Augustine returned to Rome to beg release; but Gregory sent them on. Landing in Kent in 597, they were received cautiously by King Ethelbert, whose Frankish queen, Bertha, was already a Christian.
The mission prospered beyond hope. Ethelbert was converted and baptized, and with him, tradition says, some ten thousand of his people in that first year. Augustine established his see at Canterbury, becoming the first Archbishop of the English, founded other bishoprics, and laid the foundations of the English Church that endures there to this day.
He grappled too with delicate questions — how to deal with the older Celtic Christianity of the Britons, which customs to keep — seeking Gregory's counsel in a famous exchange of letters. He died about 604. Honoured as the Apostle of the English, he remains a patron of England.
He and his monks nearly turned back in fear of the 'barbarian' English. Gregory's letter ordering them onward changed the history of England.
Image: Scriptorium de l'abbaye de Wearmouth-Jarrow (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/02081a.htm
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