Saint Augustine of Canterbury

Before being condemned to this mortal struggle against Germanic paganism, the British Church had known the perilous agitations of heresy. Pelagius, the great heresiarch of the 5th century, the great enemy of grace, was born in its midst. To defend itself from the contagion of his doctrines, it called for the help of the orthodox bishops of Gaul. Pope Celestine, who, around the same time, was sending the Roman deacon Palladius as the first bishop of the Scots of Ireland or the Hebrides, warned by this same Palladius of the danger that the faith was running in Britain, charged our great bishop of Aux erre, Saint G saint Germain Saint cited as a model of public confession for Gervin. ermanus, to go there to combat the Pelagian heresy. Twice this pontiff visited Britain and fortified it in the orthodox faith and the love of celestial grace. Germanus, accompanied the first time by the bishop of Troyes, and the second by the bishop of Trier, initially wished to use only the weapons of persuasion against the heretics. He preached to the faithful, not only in churches, but at crossroads and in the fields. He argued publicly against the Pelagian doctors in the presence of the assembled and passionately attentive people, with their wives and children. A soldier in his youth, the illustrious bishop rediscovered the intrepid ardor of his first profession to defend the people he had come to evangelize. At the head of his unarmed proselytes, he marched against a horde of Saxons and Picts, already allied against the Britons, and put them to flight by having his entire troop repeat the cry of Alleluia three times, echoed by the neighboring mountains. This is the day known as the Alleluia Victory. Happy if he could have preserved the victors forever from the sword of the barbarians, as he succeeded in curing them of the poison of heresy, for after him Pelagianism only reappeared in Britain to receive a final blow at the synod of 549. Thanks to the disciples he trained and who became the founders of the principal monasteries of Cambria, it is to our great Gallic saint that the first splendors of the cenobitic life in Britain trace back.

Everyone knows that in 444, when the Romans abandoned Great Britain, which they could no longer defend, in order to move their troops to other frontiers of the empire threatened on all sides,

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the Britons called to their aid against the Picts or inhabitants of Scotland, the Jutes, the Angles, and the Saxons, tribes from Northern Germany and Scandinavia. These auxiliaries, so imprudently called by the Britons, became the conquerors of the country and founded there a new nationality, which has persisted through all subsequent conquests and revolutions. Great Britain became and still is England, just as Gaul became and still is France. By destroying British independence, by driving back into the mountainous regions of Wales and as far as Armorica the populations that did not succumb to the long knives, from which they trace their name, the pagan Anglo-Saxons overturned and annihilated for a time on the soil of Great Britain the august edifice of the Christian religion.

During the period extending from the middle of the 5th century to the middle of the 6th, while Clovis was founding the Frankish monarchy and Saint Benedict was planting on Mount Cassino the cradle of the greatest of monastic Orders, Great Britain offered the spectacle of four divided races, struggling fiercely against one another: in the North, the Picts and the Scots, still foreign and hostile to the faith of Christ; further down, in the ancient Roman province of Valentia or Galloway, other Picts, evangelized by Saint Ninian; in the South-East, the whole country which is called today England proper, and which had fallen into the power of the Anglo-Saxons; in the South-West, the indigenous population, which remained Christian and independent, having taken refuge in Cambria or Wales and Cornwall.

But, like the Picts of the North, the Anglo-Saxons were still all pagan; from where would the light of the Gospel come to them? Would it not perhaps be from those mountains of Cambria, from that Wales where the vanquished maintained the sacred fire of the beliefs and traditions of the British Church, with its indigenous clergy and its monastic institutions?

Not only is there no mention of a single effort attempted by a British pontiff or religious to preach the faith to the conquerors; but the great historian of the Anglo-Saxon race expressly states that there was among the Britons of the great island a bias never to reveal the truths of the faith to those under whose domination or cohabitation they were condemned to live, and as a vindictive resolution, even if they were to become Christians, to treat them as incorrigible pagans. Saint Gregory the Great bears the same testimony against them in even more severe terms: "The priests," he says, "who neighbor the nation of the Angles neglect them, and, devoid of all pastoral solicitude, they refuse to respond to the desire that this people might have to convert to the faith of Christ."

At the end of the 6th century, after one hundred and fifty years of invasion and triumphant struggles, the Saxons had therefore not yet encountered, in any of the three Christian or recently converted populations (Britons, Scots, and Picts) that they had approached, fought, and defeated, either apostles disposed to announce the good news to them, or pontiffs capable of maintaining the deposit of the faith among peoples conquered by them. In 586, the last two bishops of conquered Britain, those of London and York, abandoned their churches and took refuge in the mountains of Wales,

carrying with them the sacred vessels and the holy relics that they had been able to snatch from the rapacity of the idolaters.

Other harvesters were therefore needed. From where would they come? From the inextinguishable hearth from which the light had already come to the Irish through Patrick, to the Britons and the Scots through Palladius, through Ninian, through Germanus,

Unlike the barbarian invaders of the continent, the Saxons did not adopt the religion of the people they had subjugated. In Gaul, in Spain, in Italy, Christianity had flourished again and had energetically asserted itself under the domination of the Franks and the Goths; it had conquered the conquerors. In Britain, it disappeared under the weight of foreign conquest. Nothing remained of it in the countries subjected to the Saxons when Rome sent its missionaries there; one encountered barely a few ruined churches, but not a single living Christian among the natives; victors and vanquished wandered equally in the night of paganism.

The hideous slave trade, which has successively dishonored all pagan and Christian nations, was practiced among the Anglo-Saxons with a sort of inveterate passion. It took entire centuries of incessant effort to extirpate it. It was not only captives and the vanquished that they condemned to this excess of misfortune and shame: it was their own relatives, their own countrymen; it was like the brothers of Joseph, their own flesh and blood; it was their sons and daughters whom they put up for auction and sold to merchants who had come from the continent to stock up on this human commodity among the Anglo-Saxons. It was through this infamous trade that Great Britain, having become almost as foreign to the rest of Europe as it was before Caesar, re-entered the circle of civilized nations, and it re-entered as in the time of Caesar, when Cicero anticipated no other profit for Rome from the proconsul's expedition than the proceeds from the sale of slaves!

And yet it was from the depths of this abyss of ignominy that God was to bring forth the opportunity to free England from the shackles of paganism and to introduce it, by the hand of the greatest of the Popes, into the bosom of the Church as well as into the orbit of Christian civilization.

Who will ever explain to us how these sellers of men found a market for their merchandise in Rome? Yes, in Rome, in the full light of Christianity; in Rome, six centuries after the birth of the divine Liberator, and three centuries after the peace of the Church; in Rome, subjected since Constantine to Christian emperors, and where the temporal sovereignty of the Popes was gradually growing! It was so, however, in the year of grace 580 or 587, under Pope Pelagius II. Slaves of every sex and every country, and among them, Saxon children and young people, were exposed for sale in the Roman Forum, like any other commodity. Priests and monks mingled with the crowd that came to bid or to witness the market; and among the spectators appeared the gentle, the generous, the immortal Gregory. He thus learned to detest this lepro sy of sl Grégoire Pope contemporary to Saint Psalmodius. avery which it was given to him later to restrict and to fight, but not to extirpate.

This scene has been told a hundred times, which Bede, the father of English history, had gather ed f Bède Hagiographer whose martyrology attests to the antiquity of the cult. rom the tradition of his Northumbrian ancestors, and this dialogue, where the pious and compassionate soul of Gregory is painted with such touching originality, at the same time as his strange taste for puns. Everyone knows how, at the sight of these young slaves, struck by the beauty of their faces, the dazzling whiteness of their complexion, the length of their blond hair, a probable sign of aristocratic extraction, he inquired about their homeland and their religion. The merchant replied that they came from the island of Britain, where everyone had this same complexion, and that they were pagans. Then, heaving a deep sigh: 'What a misfortune!' he exclaimed, 'that the father of darkness possesses beings with such luminous faces, and that the grace of these brows reflects a soul empty of inner grace! But what is their nation?' — They are Angles. — 'They are well named, for these Angles have the faces of angels, and they must become the brothers of the angels in heaven. But from what province have they been taken?' — From Deira (one of the two kingdoms of Northumbria). — 'That is also well,' he replied, 'De ira eruti, they shall be snatched from the ire of God, and called to the mercy of Christ. And what is the name of the king of their country?' — Alle or Ælla. — 'Be it so again: he is very well named, for the Alleluia will soon be sung in his kingdom.'

It is natural to believe that the rich and charitable abbot bought these captive children, that he immediately took them to his home, that is to say, to the palace where he was born, which he had turned into a monastery, and which was not far from the Forum where the young Britons had been exposed for sale. The redemption of these three or four slaves was thus the origin of the redemption of all of England. An Anglo-Saxon chronicler, a Christian but a layman, who wrote four centuries later, notes the empire of domestic traditions among this people. He says expressly that Gregory lodged his guests in the triclinium where he loved to serve the table of the poor with his own hands, and that after having instructed and baptized them, he wanted to take them as companions and return with them to their homeland to convert it to Christ. All authors are unanimous in recognizing that from that moment he conceived the great project of conquering the Anglo-Saxons for the Catholic Church. He devoted to it a perseverance, a devotion, and a prudence that the greatest men have not surpassed. It is known that upon leaving the scene of the slave market, he asked for and obtained from the Pope permission to be sent as a missionary to the Anglo-Saxons, and that at the news of his departure, the Romans, after having overwhelmed the Pope with reproaches, ran after their future Pontiff, and, reaching him three days' journey from Rome, brought him back by force to the eternal city.

Hardly had he been elected Pope, when the great and dear design became the object of his perpetual preoccupations; in the sixth year of his Pontificate, he decided to choose as apostles for the distant island to which his thoughts were constantly drawn, the religious of his monastery of Saint Andrew on the Caelian Hill, and to give th em as th Augustin Leader of the evangelical mission to England and first Archbishop of Canterbury. eir leader Augustine, the prior of that dear house.

This monastery is the one that today bears the name of Saint Gregory, and which is known to all those who have been to Rome.

Where is the Englishman worthy of the name who, while casting his gaze from the Palatine to the Colosseum, could contemplate without emotion and without remorse this corner of land from which came to him the faith and the name of Christian, the Bible of which he is so proud, the very Church of which he has kept the phantom? This is where the slave children of his ancestors were gathered and saved! Upon these stones knelt those who made his Christian homeland! Under these vaults was conceived by a holy soul, entrusted to God, blessed by God, accepted and accomplished by humble and generous Christians, the great design! Down these steps descended the forty monks who brought to England the word of God, the light of the Gospel with Catholic unity, the apostolic succession, and the Rule of Saint Benedict. No country has received the gift of salvation more directly from the Popes and the monks, and none, alas! has betrayed them so soon and so cruelly.

Absolutely nothing is known of what preceded, in the life of Augustine, the solemn day when, to obey the orders of the Pontiff who had been his abbot, he had to tear himself and his forty companions away from the maternal bowels of the community that served as their homeland. To fix Gregory's choice, he must have shown eminent qualities as prior of the monastery. But nothing suggests that his companions were from that moment animated by the zeal that inflamed the Pope. They arrived safely in Provence and stopped for some time at Lérins, on that island of the Saints of the Mediterranean, where, a century and a half earlier, Patrick, the monastic apostle of the island of the Saints of the Ocean, had stayed for nine years before being sent by Pope Celestine to evangelize Ireland. But there, as elsewhere, the Roman monks gathered frightening accounts of the countries they had to convert. They were told that the Anglo-Saxon people, whose language they did not know, were a people of ferocious beasts, thirsty for innocent blood, impossible to touch or to win over, and that one could only approach them by running to certain ruin. They became afraid, and instead of continuing their journey, they obtained from Augustine that he would return to Rome to beg the Pope to dispense them from a journey so painful, so perilous, and so useless. Far from granting their request, Gregory sent Augustine back to them with a letter in which he prescribed that they henceforth recognize the prior of Saint Andrew as their abbot, to obey him in everything, and above all not to let themselves be terrified by the labors of the road, nor by the language of slanderers. "It was better," he wrote to them, "not to begin this good work than to renounce it after having started it... Forward then, in the name of God... The more trouble you have, the more beautiful your glory will be in eternity. May the grace of the Almighty protect you and grant me to see the fruit of your labor in the eternal homeland; if I cannot share your labor, I will be no less at the harvest, for God knows that it is not good will that I lack."

Augustine was the bearer of numerous letters, written on the same date by the Pope, first to the abbot of Lérins, to the bishop of Aix, and to the Gallo-Frankish governor of Provence, to thank them for the good welcome they had already given the missionaries, then to the bishops of Tours, Marseille, Vienne, Autun, and especially to Virgilius, metropolitan of Arles, to recommend Augustine and his mission to them very warmly, but without explaining its nature or scope to them.

He acted differently in his letters to the two young kings of Austrasia and Burgundy and to their mother Brunhilda, who reigned in their name over all of eastern France. By invoking the orthodoxy that distinguished the Frankish nation above all others, he announced to them that he had learned that the English nation was disposed to receive the Christian faith, but that the priests of the neighboring regions (that is to say, of Cambria) had no care to preach it to them; consequently, he asked that the missionaries intended by him to sound out, and then to save, the souls of the English, might obtain interpreters to accompany them beyond the strait, and a royal safe-conduct to guarantee their safety during their journey through France.

Thus stimulated and recommended, Augustine and his religious took heart and set off again. Their obedience won the victory that had been refused to the magnanimous ardor of the great Gregory. They therefore crossed all of France, going up the Rhône and down the Loire, protected by the princes and bishops to whom the Pope had recommended them, but not without suffering more than one injury from the coarse populations, especially in Anjou, where these forty men dressed as pilgrims, walking together, sometimes taking their nightly lodging under a large tree for shelter, were welcomed as werewolves, and where the women especially distinguished themselves by their howls and their derision.

After having thus traversed all of Frankish Gaul, Augustine and his companions came to land on the southern shore of Great Britain, at the place where it draws closest to the continent and the same where previous conquerors of England had already set foot. Julius Caesar, who had revealed it to the Roman world, then Hengist with his Saxons who brought to it, along with its new name, the indelible imprint of the Germanic races.

To the south of the mouth of the Thames and on the northeast slope of the county of Kent, one sees a region still called the Isle of Thanet, although the name of island no longer suits it, because the arm of the sea that once separated it from the continent is now only a sort of marshy and brackish stream. It is there, at a place where the white and steep cliffs of this beach of Albion suddenly break off to open a sandy cove, near the ancient Roman port at Richborough, between the modern towns of Sandwich and Ramsgate, that the Roman monks first set foot on British soil. The rock that had received the imprint of Augustine's first steps was long preserved and venerated; people came there on pilgrimage to thank the living God for having led the apostle of the English there.

Scarcely landed, the lieutenant of Pope Gregory sent the interpreters he had provided himself with in France to the king of the region where the missionaries had just arrived, to announce to him that they were coming from Rome, and that they were bringing him the best of news, the true good News, with the promises of celestial joy and an eternal reign in the company of the living and true God.

This king was named Ethelbert, which meant in Anglo-Saxon Noble and valiant. Great-grandson of Hengist, Ethelbert King of the Angles converted by Augustine. the first of the Saxon conquerors, he had reigned for thirty-six years over the oldest kingdom of the Heptarchy, that of Kent.

He was naturally predisposed in favor of the Christian religion. It was that of his wife, Bertha, who had for a father Charibert, King of the Franks of Paris, grandson of Clovis. She had only been granted to this pagan king of the Saxons of Kent on the condition of being able to freely observe the precepts and practices of her faith, under the care of a Gallo-Frankish bishop, Liudhard or Letard of Senlis, who had always remained with her, and had just died when Augustine arrived. Tradition notes the sweet and amiable virtues of Queen Bertha, at the same time as her discreet zeal for the conversion of her husband and her subjects.

It is believed that Gregory held from her these data on the desire of the English to convert, which he had heard from Queen Brunhild and her grandsons. This great-granddaughter of Saint Clotilde thus seemed destined to be herself the Clotilde of England.

However, King Ethelbert did not at first authorize the Roman monks to come and find him in the Roman city of Canterbury which served as his residence. While providing for their subsistence, he prescribed that they not leave the island where they had landed, while he deliberated on what he had to do. After a few days, he went to visit them himself, but would only speak with them in the open air; one does not know what pagan superstition made him fear being the victim of some sorcery if he found himself under the same roof as these foreigners. At the sound of his approach, they advanced in procession to meet him.

"The history of the Church," says Bossuet, "has nothing more beautiful than the entry of the holy monk Augustine into the kingdom of Kent with forty of his companions, who, preceded by the cross and the image of the great King Our Lord Jesus Christ, made solemn vows for the conversion of England." At this solemn moment, where on this land once Christian, Christianity found itself face to face with idolatry, these foreigners implored the true God to save, at the same time as their own souls, all these souls for the love of whom they had torn themselves from their peaceful cloisters in Rome and had attempted this arduous enterprise. They sang the litanies in use in Rome, in the solemn and touching rhythm that had been taught to them by Gregory, their spiritual father and the father of religious music. At their head walked Augustine, whose tall stature and patrician bearing must have attracted all eyes, for he surpassed, like Saul, all the others by head and shoulders.

The king, surrounded by a large number of his faithful, received them seated under a large oak, and had them sit before him. After having listened to the speech they addressed to him as well as to the assembly, he gave them a loyal, sincere, and, as one would say today, truly liberal response. "These are fine words and fine promises; but all this is new and uncertain for me. I cannot suddenly give it credence, by abandoning everything that I have observed for so long with all my nation. But since you have come from so far to communicate to us what you yourselves, as I see, believe to be the truth and the supreme good, we will do you no harm; on the contrary, we will give you hospitality, and we will take care to provide you with what to live on, we will not prevent you from preaching your religion, and you will convert whom you can." By these words, the king signified to them the intention of reconciling fidelity to national customs with a respect for the freedom of souls that is found too rarely in history. The Catholic Church thus encountered from its first steps in England this promise of freedom which has been for so many centuries the first article and the most fundamental of all English charters and constitutions.

Faithful to this commitment, Ethelbert permitted the missionaries to follow him to Canterbury, where he assigned them a dwelling that is still called Stable Gate, the gate of the Inn. The forty missionaries made a solemn entry into this city, carrying their silver cross, with the painting on wood where Christ was depicted, and singing all in uni son this r Cantorbéry Capital of the Kingdom of Kent and center of the Augustinian mission. efrain of the litany: "We beseech Thee, O Lord, by all Thy mercy, to spare in Thy wrath this city and Thy holy house, for we have sinned. Alleluia." It is thus, says a monastic historian, that the first Fathers and the first doctors of the faith of the English entered their future metropolis, and inaugurated the triumphant labor of the Cross of Jesus.

Outside the city, to the East, there was a small church under the patronage of Saint Martin, dating from Roman times, where Queen Bertha went to pray and practice her faith. It was there that Augustine and his companions also went to chant their monastic office, celebrate Mass, preach, and baptize. They were now at peace, thanks to royal munificence regarding the necessities of life, endowed with the supreme good of liberty, and using this liberty to work for the propagation of the truth. They lived there, says the most truthful of historians, the life of the Apostles in the primitive Church; assiduous in prayer, vigils, and fasting, they preached the word of life to all whom they could approach, despising all the goods of this world, accepting from their neophytes only the strict necessities, living in all things in accordance with their doctrine, and ready to suffer everything and even die for the truth they preached. The innocent simplicity of their life and the heavenly sweetness of their doctrine appeared to the Saxons as arguments of invincible eloquence, and each day saw the number of those requesting baptism grow.

The good and loyal Ethelbert did not lose sight of the missionaries: soon, charmed like so many others by the purity of their life and seduced by the promises whose truth more than one miracle attested, he requested and received baptism at the hands of Augustine. It was on the day of Pentecost in the year of grace 597 that this Anglo-Saxon king thus entered into the unity of the holy Church of Christ. Since the baptism of Constantine, and if one excepts that of Clovis, there had been no more significant event in the annals of Christendom. A crowd of Saxons followed the example of their king, and the monastic missionaries left their first asylum to preach on all sides, building churches here and there. The king, faithful to the end to that noble respect for the conscience of others of which he had given the example even before being a Christian, did not wish to force anyone to change their religion. He limited himself to loving more those who, baptized like him, became his fellow citizens in the heavenly homeland. The Saxon king had learned from the Italian monks that no constraint is compatible with the service of Christ. It was not to unite England to the Roman Church, but to tear it away, a thousand years later, that another king and other apostles had to employ tortures and stakes.

In the meantime, Augustine, seeing himself henceforth at the head of an important Christendom and in accordance with the instructions given by the Pope, returned to France to be consecrated Archbishop of the English b y the famous metropoli archevêque des Anglais Leader of the evangelical mission to England and first Archbishop of Canterbury. tan of Arles, Virgilius, that former ab bot of Virgile Metropolitan of Arles who consecrated Augustine. Lérins whom Gregory had established as his vicar over all the churches of the kingdom of the Franks. Having returned to Canterbury, he found that the example of the king and the labors of his companions had borne fruit beyond all expectations, to such an extent that on the solemnity of Christmas of the same year (597), more than ten thousand Anglo-Saxons presented themselves to receive Baptism, and this sacrament was administered to them at the mouth of the Medway in the Thames, opposite the island of Sheppey, where one of the main stations of the British fleet and one of the great centers of England's maritime power is located today.

The first of the neophytes was also the first of the benefactors of the nascent Church. Ethelbert, increasingly imbued with respect and devotion for the faith he had just embraced, wished to give a striking pledge of his pious humility by abandoning his own palace in the city of Canterbury to the new archbishop and henceforth establishing his royal residence at Reculver, an ancient Roman fortress on the shore neighboring the island where Augustine had landed. Next to the king's dwelling, transformed into a monastery for the archbishop and his religious, and on the site of an old church from Roman times, they began to build a basilica destined to become, under the name of the Church of the Savior or Christ (Christ Church), the metropolis of England. Augustine was both its first archbishop and its first abbot.

Augustine, always in search of the vestiges that the ancient faith had left in Great Britain, was able to discover the location of a Christian church, transformed into a pagan temple and surrounded by a sacred wood. Ethelbert abandoned this temple to him with all the surrounding land. The archbishop immediately remade it into a church which he dedicated to Saint Pancras, a young martyr of Rome, whose memory was dear to the Roman monks, because the monastery of Mount Celius, from which they had all come and where their father Gregory was born, had been built on land formerly belonging to the family of Pancras. Around this new sanctuary, Augustine raised another monastery, of which one of his companions, Peter, was the first abbot, and which he intended to serve as his burial place, according to the Roman custom which placed cemeteries outside cities and along major roads. He consecrated this new foundation under the invocation of the apostles of Rome, Peter and Paul, but it is under his own name that this famous abbey has become one of the most opulent and venerated sanctuaries of Christendom, and that it was for several centuries the necropolis of the kings and primates of England, at the same time as the first center of religious and intellectual life in the south of Great Britain.

From the very first year of his mission, Augustine had sent two of his companions to Rome: Laurence, who was to replace him as archbishop, and Peter, who was to be the first abbot of the new monastery of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, to announce to the Pope the great and good news of the conversion of the King and the Kingdom of Kent, then to ask him for new collaborators, the harvest being great and the laborers few; finally, to consult him on eleven important and delicate points concerning the discipline and direction of the new Christians.

One can understand Gregory's joy; in the midst of the perils and trials of the Church, in the midst of his own material and moral sufferings, he saw the dearest dream of his soul being realized. The most audacious of his projects was crowned with success. A new people had just been introduced into the Church by his gentle and persevering activity until the end of time; countless souls were to owe him their entry into the great confraternity of souls here below as well as into the eternal joys above. Certainly, he did not foresee the great men, the great Saints, the immense resources, the indomitable champions that England was to provide to the Catholic Church; but he also had the happiness of ignoring the defection that was one day to uncrown so much glory, and that cowardly ingratitude which dared to ignore or belittle in him, as in his lieutenants, the incomparable benefit he conferred upon the English people by initiating them into the light of the Gospel.

He remained until his last day faithful to the active solicitude that his dear England inspired in him. He sent Augustine a new monastic colony, provided with relics, sacred vessels, priestly vestments, altar hangings, everything required by the pomp of worship, and above all, books intended to form the beginning of an ecclesiastical library.

At the head of this new swarm of religious was a man of very noble birth, named Mellitus, and his brother Justus, who were to occupy the metropolitan see of Canterbury one after the other, then Paulinus, the future apostle of Northumbria.

He entrusted the new missionaries with a long letter to King Ethelbert, where, while congratulating him on his conversion and comparing him to Constantine, just as he had compared Bertha to Saint Helena, he exhorted him to spread the faith among his subjects, to proscribe the worship of idols, to overthrow their temples, and to establish good morals through exhortations, kindness, and threats, but above all by his own example. He adds: "You have with you our most reverend brother, Bishop Augustine, raised in the monastic Rule, filled with the knowledge of the Scriptures, full of good works in the eyes of God. Listen devoutly and fulfill faithfully everything he tells you: for the more you listen to what he tells you on behalf of God, the more God will hear him himself when he prays for you. Attach yourself, therefore, to him with all the strength of your soul with the fervor of faith; and support his efforts with all the strength that God has given you."

The same day, he conferred upon Augustine the right to wear the pallium while celebrating Mass, to reward him for having created the new Church of the English. This honor was to pass to all his successors in the archiepiscopal see. He constituted him metropolitan of the twelve bishoprics that he enjoined him to erect in southern England.

But while, in the eyes of men, he thus crowned the confidence and authority with which he invested Augustine, he secretly addressed to him warnings intended to preserve him from the perils of pride. "In our joy," he wrote to him, "there is great cause for fear. I know, dearest brother, that God has performed great miracles through you in this nation. One must rejoice that the souls of the English are drawn by external miracles to internal grace; but one must fear that these wonders might lead the infirm soul to presumption and cause man to fall inwardly through vainglory even more than they exalt him outwardly. When the disciples said to their divine Master: Lord, in your name, the demons themselves are subject to us; He answered them: Do not rejoice in this, but that your names are written in heaven. The names of all the elect are written there, and yet not all the elect perform miracles... While God acts thus through you outwardly, you must, dearest brother, judge yourself scrupulously inwardly and know well who you are. If you remember having offended God by your tongue or by your works, always keep your faults present in your memory to repress the vainglory that would arise in your heart. Think that this gift of miracles is not given to you for yourself, but for those whose salvation is entrusted to you... There are miracles of the reprobate, and we do not even know if we are among the elect. One must therefore harshly depress the soul in the midst of all these wonders and signs, for fear that it might seek its own glory and private advantage... God has given us only one sign to recognize his elect: it is to love one another."

Then immediately, wishing to lift up with a return of tender compassion the friend he had just corrected, he continues in these terms: "I speak thus because I desire to prostrate the soul of my dear listener in humility. But let your humility itself have confidence. Sinner that I am, I have a certain hope that all your sins will be forgiven you, since you have been chosen to procure remission for others. If there is more joy in heaven for one repentant sinner than for ninety-nine just men, what joy will there not be for a whole great people who, in coming to the faith, does penance for all the evil it has done? And this joy, it is you who will have given it to heaven."

In an earlier letter from Gregory, addressed no longer to Augustine but to his friend Eulogius, Patriarch of Alexandria, the Pope also notes the miracles that had signaled Augustine's mission. He does not even fear comparing them to the signs and wonders that had accompanied the preaching of the Apostles.

Strangely, neither Bede nor any other historian gives the slightest detail on the wonders that awakened at once the admiration, the gratitude, and the prudence of Saint Gregory the Great. But, of all possible miracles, the greatest is surely "to have detached from paganism, without violence, a violent people, to introduce it into Christian society, not man by man and family by family, but at a single stroke, with its kings, its warrior nobility, its institutions." This king who believes he descends from the gods of the Scandinavian paradise, and who abandons his capital to the priests of the crucified God; this ferocious and idolatrous people who rush by the thousands to meet a few foreign monks, and by the thousands plunge into the icy waves of the Thames, in the middle of winter, to receive Baptism from the hand of these strangers; this transformation so rapid and so complete of a proud and victorious, sensual and rapacious race, by a doctrine solely intended to tame greed, pride, and sensuality, and which, once it had descended into these savage hearts, was imprinted there forever, is that not of all wonders the most marvelous as well as the most uncontested?

Finally, and after all these letters, Gregory addressed a very long and very detailed response to the eleven questions that Augustine had asked him regarding the main difficulties he encountered or foresaw in his mission. One would have to cite this response in its entirety, an admirable monument of light, of conciliatory reason, of gentleness, of wisdom, of moderation, and of prudence, destined to become, as it has been very justly said, the rule and code of Christian missions.

Questioned about the penalties to be inflicted on sacrilegious thieves, and about the provision of Roman law, which imposed on the thief the restitution of double or quadruple, Gregory prescribes taking into account, in the punishment, the indigence or the wealth of the thief, but always with paternal charity, and a moderation that keeps the soul within the limits of reason. As for restitution, "God forbid," he says, "that the Church should want to gain from what it has lost, and seek to profit from the folly of men!"

Hardly had he written to King Ethelbert, the letter where he exhorted him to destroy the temples of the old national cult, than he reconsidered, and after a few days he dispatched a completely different instruction to the head of the new mission, to that Mellitus whom he qualifies as abbot and whom he had charged with carrying his letter to the king. He hoped to join him on the way. "Since the departure of the whole company that is with you," he writes to him, "I am very anxious, for I have learned nothing of the success of your journey. But when the almighty God has led you to our most reverend brother Augustine, tell him that, after having long turned over in my mind the affair of the English, I have recognized that one must not at all tear down the temples of the idols, but only the idols that are in them. After having sprinkled these temples with holy water, let altars and relics be placed there; for if these temples are well built, they must be made to pass from the worship of demons to the service of the true God, so that this nation, seeing that its temples are not destroyed, may convert more easily, and come to adore the true God in the places that are known to it."

It is appropriate here to speak of the divergences that existed between Rome and the ancient British Church, neighbor to the English; between Rome and the Christianities of Ireland and Caledonia.

The capital dissidence concerned the date of the celebration of the feast of Easter. From the earliest centuries, prolonged discussions had arisen over the day on which it was fitting to celebrate the greatest feast of the Church. The Council of Nicaea had fixed the time of the paschal solemnities to the Sunday after the fourteenth day of the moon of the spring equinox, and this date, sanctioned by the Roman Church, had been brought into all the churches of Britain with the Christian faith, as by Saint Patrick in Ireland, and by Saint Columbanus in Caledonia. But the Church of Alexandria had noticed an astronomical error that stemmed from the use by Christians of the old Judaic cycle; it had introduced a more exact computation, adopted throughout the Orient, and from which there resulted, from the pontificate of Saint Leo the Great (440-461), a difference of an entire month between the day of Easter in Rome and the day of Easter in Alexandria. Finally, toward the middle of the 6th century, in 532, an agreement was reached: Rome adopted the calculation of Dionysius Exiguus, which no longer allowed for error regarding the day fixed by the Council of Nicaea, and uniformity of date was re-established in the Church. But the Saxon invasion had intercepted the habitual communications between Rome and the British churches. The latter retained the old Roman usage; and it was precisely the attachment to this Roman usage that served as their argument against the more exact calculations brought to them by Augustin and his Italian monks, which they rejected as suspicious novelties, as a derogation from the traditions of their fathers. It was, as we see, to remain faithful to the primitive teachings of Rome that they resisted the new Roman missionaries.

If there had been the slightest dogmatic or moral dissent between the Britons and the Roman Church, Augustin would never have committed the signal folly of soliciting the assistance of the Celtic clergy for the conversion of the pagan Saxons. It would have been sowing confusion and discord in the new Church that was to be constituted by the energetic cooperation of the indigenous Christianity with the envoys of Rome.

Nothing is more painful than to encounter in history endless and passionate struggles over causes or questions that, after some time, interest no one and that no one understands anymore. But it is not only Christian antiquity; all centuries offer such spectacles. And to those who might be scandalized by the excessive importance that the most pious souls of their time attached to such minutiae, it suffices to recall the stubborn obstinacy that great peoples, such as the English and the Russians, have shown in rejecting the reform of the Gregorian calendar, some for nearly two centuries, others until the very heart of the uniformity of the contemporary world.

How can one imagine that, for this petty and miserable difference, the two Churches remained for two centuries on a war footing toward one another? Since the Celts of the British Isles held their ancient usage from Rome itself, why not follow her in her perfected calculation, as in everything else in the West? Why insist on rejoicing when the Romans were fasting, and fasting when they were singing the Alleluia?

Was there not a more serious, deeper cause for the dissidence of which the paschal controversy covered only the surface? One cannot doubt it; and of all the causes, the most natural and the most excusable was the instinct of national preservation, exacerbated by hatred of the triumphant enemy and translating into distrust of the foreigner, who seemed the accomplice of the enemy.

Augustin felt well that he needed the Celtic Christians to carry out the great work that the Papacy had entrusted to him. Formed in the conciliatory and moderate school of Saint Gregory the Great, imbued with his recent instructions, he was far from showing himself exclusive regarding persons or local customs, and, to complete the conversion of the Saxons, he sincerely requested the cooperation of the numerous and powerful clergy, who for more than a century had been the soul of the resistance against the pagans and who populated those great cloisters of Cambria, where the sword of the conquerors had not yet penetrated.

But the Britons opposed him with a jealous and stubborn resistance. They did not want to join him in evangelizing their enemies; they had no desire to open the gates of heaven to them.

Augustin succeeded, however, in obtaining that the principal bishops and doctors of Wales would hold a public conference with him. It was agreed to meet on the borders of Wessex, near the banks of the Severn, which separated the Saxons from the Britons. The interview, like that of Augustin with Ethelbert after his landing, took place in the open air and under an oak that long kept the name of Augustin's Oak. He began, not by claiming the personal supremacy that the Pope had conceded to him, but by exhorting the Celtic Christians to live in Catholic peace with him and to unite their efforts with his to evangelize the pagans, that is to say, the Saxons. But neither his prayers, nor his exhortations, nor his reproaches, nor the words of his monastic collaborators, joined to his own, nothing succeeded in bending the Britons, who persisted in invoking their traditions against the new rules. After a contest as long as it was laborious, Augustin finally said: "Let us pray to God, who makes those of one mind dwell together, to show us by heavenly signs which traditions should be followed. Let a sick person be brought, and he whose prayers shall have healed him shall be the one whose faith must be followed." The Britons consented reluctantly; a blind Anglo-Saxon was brought, whom the British bishops could not heal. Then Augustin knelt and prayed to God to enlighten the conscience of many of the faithful by restoring sight to this man. Immediately, the blind man recovered his sight. The Britons were at first touched; they recognized that Augustin walked in the way of justice and truth, but they said that they could not renounce their old customs without the consent of the people, and asked for a second assembly where their deputies would be more numerous.

This second conference soon took place. Augustin found himself in the presence of seven British bishops and the most learned doctors of the great monastery of Bangor, populated by more than three thousand monks. Before the new interview, the Britons wen t to consult an anc monastère de Bangor Major Breton monastery opposed to Augustine. horite, very renowned among them for his wisdom and holiness, and asked him if they should listen to Augustin and abandon their traditions. "Yes," said the anchorite, "if he is a man of God." "But how to know?" "If he is gentle and humble of heart as the Gospel says, it is probable that he bears the yoke of Jesus Christ and that it is this yoke he offers you; but if he is harsh and proud, he does not come from God, and you should take no heed of his words. To discover this, let him arrive first at the place of the council, and if he rises when you approach, you will know that he is a servant of Jesus Christ and you will obey him; but if he does not rise to do you honor, despise him as he will have despised you." They conformed to the instructions of the anchorite; unfortunately, upon arriving at the council, they found Augustin already seated, as was the custom of the Romans, says a historian, and he did not rise to receive them. That was enough to turn them against him. "If this man," they said, "does not deign to rise for us now, how much more will he despise us when we are subject to him?" They became from then on intractable and studied to contradict him in everything. No more than at the first conference did the archbishop make any effort to have them recognize his personal authority. Let us note to the honor of this stubborn race and this rebellious, but fervent and generous clergy, that Augustin did not reproach them for any of those deviations from the purity of priestly life that some authors have imputed to them. With a moderation scrupulously in conformity with the instructions of the Pope, he reduced all his pretensions to three points. "You have," he said to them, "many practices contrary to our usage, which is that of the universal Church; we admit them all without difficulty, if only you will believe me on three points: to celebrate Easter in its time, to complete the sacrament of Baptism according to the usage of the holy Roman Church, and to preach with us the word of God to the English nation." To this triple request, the Celtic bishops and monks opposed a triple refusal, and added that they would never recognize him as archbishop. They were, moreover, rejecting only the personal supremacy of Augustin, and in no way that of the Holy See. What they feared was not a distant Pope, impartial and universally respected in Rome; it was a sort of new pope at Canterbury, on the territory and at the disposal of their hereditary enemies, the Saxons. And above all, they did not want to be spoken to about working to convert those odious Saxons who had slaughtered their ancestors and usurped their lands. "No," said the abbot of Bangor, "we will not preach the faith to this cruel race of foreigners who have treacherously expelled our ancestors from their country and stripped their posterity of its inheritance."

Now, it is easy to see which of the three conditions Augustin had most at heart, by the threatening prediction he opposed to the refusal of the British monks. "Since you do not want to make peace with brothers, you will have war with enemies; since you do not want to show the English the way of life, you will receive from their hands the punishment of death."

This prophecy was only too cruelly fulfilled a few years later. The king of the North Angles, Ethelfrid, still a pagan, came to invade the region of Cambria, where the great monastery of Bangor was situated. At the moment when the combat was beginning between his numerous army and that of the Welsh, he saw in the distance, on a high site, a troop of men without arms and all on their knees. "Who are those people?" he asked. He was told that they were the monks of the great monastery of Bangor who, after three days of fasting, had come to pray for their brothers during the combat. "If they pray to their God against my enemies," said the king, "they are fighting against us, even if without arms." Immediately he directed the first attack against them: The Welsh prince, who should have defended them, fled shamefully, and twelve hundred monks were massacred on the spot.

A calumny, already old and reheated in our days, has claimed that Augustin had provoked this invasion and designated the monastery of Bangor to the pagans of Northumbria. Now, the Venerable Bede expressly states that he had already been in heaven for a long time. It is quite enough that Bede himself, much more Saxon than Christian whenever it concerns the Britons, applauds more than a century later this massacre, and sees in it a just vengeance of heaven against what he calls the infamous militia of the perfidious, that is to say, against heroic Christians who died for the defense of their homes and their altars, under the knife of the pagan Anglo-Saxons, by the orders of the leader who, by the testimony of Bede himself, exterminated the most natives.

Condemned by the obstinacy of the Britons to be deprived of their assistance, Augustine nonetheless continued what his biographer calls the hunt for men, by evangelizing the Saxons. And yet, even among them, he sometimes encountered opposition that manifested itself in insult and derision, especially when he crossed the borders of the kingdom of Ethelbert. Thus, while traveling through that region of the land of the West Saxons, which is called Dorsetshire today, he and his companions fell into the midst of a maritime population that overwhelmed them with insults and outrages. These pagan savages did not only refuse to hear them; they did not even shrink from acts of violence to drive them away, and then, in chasing them from their territory with a truly Teutonic coarseness, they attached to the black robes of the poor Italian monks, as a sign of opprobrium, fish tails from the catch they lived on. Augustine was not a man to be discouraged by so little. Moreover, he met in other places crowds that were more attentive and more grateful. Thus he persevered for seven whole years, and until his death, in these apostolic journeys, traveling as a true missionary after as well as before his archiepiscopal consecration, always on foot and without baggage, and intermingling his tireless preaching with benefits and wonders, sometimes by making unknown springs gush from the ground, sometimes by healing incurable or dying sick people with his touch.

Saint Gregory the Great died in the first months of the year 603, and two months later, Augustine followed his father and friend to the grave. The Roman missionary was buried, according to the custom of Rome, on the edge of the public road, near the great Roman road that led from Canterbury to the sea, in the unfinished church of the famous monastery that was to take and keep his name.

Later, the relics of Saint Augustine were transferred to the city, and they were deposited in the porch of the cathedral. On September 6, 1091, they were raised; then, after having enclosed them in an urn, they were hidden in the wall of the Church above the window that looks to the East. However, a little dust and some of the smallest bones were left in the porch. In 1221, the head of the Saint was placed in a shrine enriched with gold and precious stones; the other bones were enclosed in a marble tomb adorned with several beautiful pieces of sculpture and engraving. Things remained in this state until the demolition of the monasteries in England.

The figure of Saint Augustine of Canterbury naturally pales beside that of Saint Gregory the Great; his fame is as if absorbed into the luminous hearth from which the glory of the Pontiff radiates. Furthermore, English and German historians of our day have delighted in highlighting the inferiority of the one whom Gregory had chosen as lieutenant and friend. They have vied with each other in belittling his character and his services, accusing him by turns of haughtiness and weakness, of irresolution and obstinacy, of softness and vanity, attaching themselves above all to pointing out and magnifying the appearances of hesitation and personal preoccupation that they unravel in his life. It is permitted to these strange rigorists to reproach him for having remained below the ideal that they claim to dream of and which no hero of their side has ever approached. In our sense, the few shadows that are cast upon the noble career of this great Saint are made to touch and console his fellows, infirm, like him, and sometimes burdened with a mission that they deem, like him, to be above their strength. One likes to encounter these weaknesses, encouraging for the common run of mortals, in the artisans of the great works that have transformed history and decided the fate of nations.

Let us therefore know how to keep intact our admiration and our gratitude for the first missionary, the first bishop, and the first abbot of the English people; let us know how to applaud this council which, a century and a half after his death, decreed that his name would always be invoked in the Litanies after that of Gregory, "because it is he who, sent by our Father Gregory, first brought to the English nation the sacrament of Baptism and the discovery of the heavenly homeland."

The great function of Saint Augustine was to baptize. Thus he is represented conferring Baptism on King Ethelbert, the most illustrious of his neophytes; making a fountain spring up on a day when water happened to be lacking for him to administer the sacrament of regeneration: it is still shown in Dorsetshire, and for a long time it was reputed to be miraculous; one can still characterize him by means of the long-handled cross that is attributed to the legates of the Holy See.

AA. SS.; Ecclesiastical History of Bede; Montalembert, Monks of the West; Godescard, etc.