Saint Augustine of Canterbury

Saint Augustine of Canterbury was a Roman monk whom Pope Gregory the Great sent on a mission to the Angles. He became the first archbishop of Canterbury, and for this reason he is called the apostle of England. The Church commemorates him on May 27.

Neither the year nor the place of his birth is known. He belonged to the community of the monastery of Saint Andrew, which Gregory had set up in his family home on the Caelian Hill in Rome, and he was its superior. When Gregory became pope, he decided to send monks from this monastery to the pagan Angles in Britain.

In 596 Augustine set out with a group of monks. In Gaul his companions took fright at the distant people whose language they did not know, and wanted to turn back. Augustine therefore returned to Rome to ask the pope to release them from the mission. In a letter Gregory encouraged the monks to persevere and appointed Augustine their abbot. In 597 the missionaries, nearly forty of them according to Bede the Venerable, landed on the Isle of Thanet in Kent.

The king of Kent at that time was Ethelbert, whose wife, the Frankish princess Bertha, was a Christian. The king listened to the newcomers in the open air and allowed them to live in his capital, Canterbury, and to preach the Gospel. There the monks lived after the example of the first Christians, in prayer and fasting, and gathered in the old church of Saint Martin. In time the king himself came to believe and received baptism. Yet he forced no one to accept the faith, for, as Bede writes, he had learned from the missionaries that the service of Christ must be freely given.

Augustine received episcopal consecration in Gaul. Gregory wrote joyfully to the bishop of Alexandria that at Christmas 597 Augustine had baptized more than ten thousand Angles. In 601 the pope sent him the pallium, new co-workers, and a plan for two metropolitan sees, in London and in York. In Canterbury Augustine restored a church from Roman times and dedicated it to Christ the Savior, and outside the city he founded the monastery of Saints Peter and Paul.

He also sought unity with the bishops of the Britons. He asked them to celebrate Easter at the same time as the whole Church and to preach the Gospel to the Angles together with him, but no agreement was reached. In 604 he ordained Mellitus bishop of London and Justus bishop of Rochester. He died on May 26; the year of his death is not certain, and 604 or 605 is given. He was laid to rest beside the church of Saints Peter and Paul, and Laurence succeeded him in Canterbury.

Augustine lived long before canonization processes were introduced; the Church has venerated him as a saint since the early Middle Ages. The inscription on his tomb declared that he had led King Ethelbert and his people from the worship of idols to faith in Christ. In 1982, in Canterbury Cathedral, John Paul II recalled him as the great missionary sent by Gregory the Great.