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Catholic Saints
St. Augustine of Canterbury
00:19:02
St. Augustine of Canterbury is often called the "Apostle to the English". A great missionary, St. Augustine was pivotal in converting the Anglo-Saxons to the Catholic faith. Join Dr. James Prothro and Mary McGeehan as they discuss this great saint and his witness to Jesus Christ.
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A
You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute, an apostolate helping Catholics understand, live, and share their faith.
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B
Welcome to Catholic Saints. My name is Mary McGhan. I work here at the Auguston Institute, and today I AM joined with Dr. James Prothero, professor of Theology and Sacred Scripture. Is that correct?
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C
That is very correct. Thanks so much, Mary, for having me on.
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B
Thank you for joining us. So this series is to talk about the lives of the saints, what we can learn about our friends in heaven, to be sources of inspiration for us today on our own journey. Today we're talking about St. Augustine of Canterbury. I personally know little about the saint. So what are just some biographical information that we should know about this saint.
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C
So really basic, and we can come back to any of this. That's interesting, but really, really basic. St. Augustine of Canterbury was born in. He was a saint in the sort of 500s and died in the early 600s in Great Britain. And he was bishop at Canterbury, which is in Kent, which is in England. You can go over there today, of course. But he's called the Apostle to the English because he was sent by Pop. Gregory I to evangelize the Anglo Saxons there. There were already lots of Christians in the area who had been Christianized through the Roman Empire, but then the Romans had pulled all their legions out in the 400s, and there were all these sort of Irish and Celtic Christians on the one side, and then a whole bunch of pagans in the middle, sort of separating all of the Christians from the European side on the eastern side of the British Isles. And they were really isolated, and there were a whole bunch of these pagans there, and nobody was really missionizing them or evangeliz. And so anyway, he got sent with several other people in the late 500s to go and try to convert the people there, the pagans, the Anglo Saxons. And he had a lot of success.
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B
So was he one of the first missionaries, would you say? He brought Catholicism to the Great Britain region.
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C
So there was already a lot of, again, kind of Irish and Celtic Christianity on the west side of the island from the Romans, right. Because some of the people had come over during the Roman Empire time and evangelized a lot of people. But he was the first missionary, not to the kind of Celts and Britain people on that side, but to the Saxons and the Angles, what now we call English. Right. Where we got that word from. So he's the apostle to the English. And another thing that's interesting about him is that this is A time period where the Celtic church was. Celtic church isn't really like super helpful because it wasn't like that organized. Like there was a Celtic church with like one guy in charge or something like that, but kind of Celtic Christianity in its different forms was sort of isolated. Right. They're way off on the island and they're not even on the side where they can easily pop over to France and go over to Europe. They're really disconnected also from the Pope and Rome. And some of the things that developed there are really, really helpful and we still do today, like our practice of having private confession and private absolution and penance that really comes from them more than it came from Rome or Greece or any of the other places where they did things a lot more publicly. Interesting. So a lot of the things that happened in Celtic Christianity who had already been evangelized by like St. Patrick and St. Columba in the 400s, some of those things were really cool. But then other ones were kind of at variance from what was going on in the rest of the world and people didn't know it. When Augustine. They're isolated because they're isolated. Yeah. So when Augustine shows up in England and he ends up meeting some of these Celtic Christians, like, wait a minute, why do you celebrate Easter on that day? Why do you. They had other controversies about the tansur, the sort of monkey haircut. Sorry, not a monkey haircut, a monk monastic haircut.
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B
It's a good book. Yes, right, it is.
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C
And the Roman one was, you know, sort of shaved top up here. And they had a different custom among the Britons and the Celts and we're not 100% sure exactly what it was because there aren't a whole lot of descriptions, but there's one little sort of bit of statuary that we have where it looks like their Tansur had hair going up like this and then shaved all the way down the back and in the front, front. So it was like they just had a sort of stripe of hair here instead of just the stripe of hair around here. And of course, these are really deep seated customs in how you look, how you dress. Right. And so there's all these. There end up being these fights about these sorts of things in the date of Easter and other things like that. So these guys were really isolated and Augustine was part of really not only bringing Christianity to the Angles and the Saxons, who had been pagan, but also starting to integrate, which took, you know, another 60 to 100 years, starting to integrate the Celtic Christianity with the Roman Catholic Church and the sort of universal customs that were observed in the West.
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B
Okay, so were there particular teachings that he's known for or particular. I don't know if there. It sounds like integration of cultures. If this community was pretty isolated, that he has a legacy for that we. Yeah, just praise him for today.
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C
Yeah. So his. When I look at. At his own legacy and the story of his life, I think especially about three things we don't have a whole lot of material from him specifically about, like a specific contribution to doctrine. Right. Like we would expect from a doctor of the Church. But in his saintliness and his virtue. Here's three things. The first one I think is obedience. So one of the things that's quite amazing to me in this story, thinking about it today in terms of all of our fears, both in terms of the life of mission, but then also when there's kind of culture clashes, Right. Or clashes between traditions. Right. Where we get nervous and we don't want to engage or we don't want to obey, maybe. So in about 597 AD, Augustine, with these 40 other. So guys, gets sent. He was an abbot in Rome. He was known for being good at sacred Scripture. And then he was also a good administrator because he was head of a monastery or he's a prior at a monastery in Rome. Gregory sends him with these guys over here to England because a Roman Catholic from France has just married the King of the Angles in Kent. And so they're like, okay, well, that's a good inroad. Right. So there's a nice strategy. But they get all the way over to France and all of the guys with Augustine say, hey, you know what, we don't want to do this. There are a whole bunch of pagans there. We've heard about brutality. The king isn't going to be super nice to us. Like, this is going to be terrifying. Pretty excited. Yeah. So they actually sent Augustine back to Rome before they even got to England to go back and ask the Pope, hey, can we not.
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B
Oh, I didn't know that.
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C
Yeah. And Pope Gregory said, no, go, you must go. And so he said, okay. So they went back and they obeyed. Right. Despite all their fears. And here's what ends up happening, right? They get there and the King doesn't convert immediately. He does convert pretty soon, but what he does is he says, you guys are allowed to preach your message. I'm not going to force my people to convert, but they can if they want to and there'll be no political repercussions on Them, right? If they turn from paganism to your religion. And so they start preaching, right? He founds a monastery there, monastery of Saints Peter and Paul in Canterbury. But later on it became St. Augustine's Abbey is what it's called after him. He didn't name it after himself, but anyway, so they go there and not only do they find somebody who actually, even though he sounds scary and is pagan, actually will allow them to preach, ultimately, then he converts himself and he doesn't even force all of his own court to convert too. Sometimes when a king gets baptized and becomes Christian, he said, now everybody, you're doing what I'm doing. And King Ethelbert was the guy's name. He didn't do that. His wife was Christian now he was Christian. But some of the people that he has in his sort of inner council haven't converted yet. And he doesn't force it. There was a lot of patience there and all of it and all the fruit of like tens of thousands of people and ultimately the rest of England ends up converting by this missionary impulse that Augustine has and that he's sent with from the Pope because he obeyed, right? So obedience is big. And then also striving for unity, right? That there's this kind of patience. And yet it's also matched with this missionary zeal, which I think is really cool because. Go ahead.
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B
Do we know was his style, was he preaching on street corners, Was he preaching in pulpits? Do we know what his method was?
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C
Seems to be both. And of course, he had all his posse there, right, of people who had come and then of new people that he would consecrate to the priesthood after they'd come through. But he just sort of did everything. They converted old pagan temples to Christian worship. The king had them change different feast days, right? Old sort of pagan feasts were sort of transformed into Christian feasts. But he. One of the things, the cool thing about Augustine, I think, is that Christianity had been there for like we said, 100 years or so, right? And Columba and Patrick had been there, right, in Ireland. And a lot of the Celts had converted, but they hadn't had a big missionary zeal to convert the Anglo Saxons. So you just had all these territories where people are like, well, we're Christian, but they're pagan. And that's kind of how it is. And when the Pope sent Augustine, he said, no, get him, go tell him the good news, right, and bring him to the faith. And that's what Augustine did. And he just preached and he invited and he seems to have also been fairly patient, even though he also was insistent. Right, right.
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B
Interesting. That's a great example of, I think, standing on the shoulders of giants, you know, standing on the people that come before us, and then being obedient to the Holy Spirit, where the Holy Spirit is leading your particular mission. And even in those fears, still being obedient and responding because you don't know what. What God's going to do.
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C
Yeah, that's right. And sometimes the Holy Spirit think, speaking through church officials, that you're like, wait, what? Is he serious? Yeah. This seems like a waste of time.
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B
I love that they went to the Pope and you could just. Are you sure about this?
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C
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can we add.
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B
Actually, yeah. Wharton should. Okay. And then what were the other two?
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C
Oh, sorry. So that.
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B
Yes.
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C
Yeah. So I had three. So one was obedience, and then another one was his missionary zeal. Right. For evangelism.
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B
And then unity.
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C
Yeah. And then the third really is just the unity. So he himself wasn't incredibly successful at uniting the Roman Catholic Church, connected to the Pope and the customs of the rest of the Western world with the Celts. Celts were nervous about this. There's politics, too. Right. But his influence there and his presence there, and then the legacy that built up in Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English peoples, English people. He tells us some of the stories about St. Augustine of Canterbury, but then he also tells about how a lot of these things got settled. And one of the things that's fun to read is at the Synod of Whitby later in the 600s, when there was finally a decision made about, when are we going to celebrate Easter? Because this is a big controversy. They had already settled it, had already been working on it over between the east and the west, over in Rome and Greece and Syria and places like that. But the Celts had just been doing their own thing, and they had calculated, based on a reading, that they had of something in John's Gospel, mostly. And they said St. Columba, who had come and evangelized so many of them, had followed this custom, too. And so the king had two delegates, one from Rome, one from the English Roman Church that Augustine had started, and then another one from the Celts. And the guys from the Celts said, well, we're following what we think is in the Apostle John, and it's what Saint Columba taught us. And he was a great holy man. And the other guys said, columba was a great and holy man, but we follow the custom of Saints Peter And Paul, who reigned in Rome. And Saint Peter is the one to whom Jesus said, I give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. You're the rock on which I'll build my church. And in Bede's account, at least, the king who's trying to help make the decision for his region says, says to the Celtic guy, did Jesus say that to Peter? And the Celtic guy goes, well, yeah. And he goes, well, let's follow Peter's custom then. But the guy from Rome didn't say, y' all are wrong. The heck with Columba, right? Forget this other saints. Forget all these other people. We're coming in and we're taking over. He doesn't do that. He says, Columba was a holy man, but. Right.
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B
The poster of humility.
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C
Exactly. This custom comes from where Peter is, and we want to be there. Right. And Columba is still a wonderful person and a saint and a great teacher who evangelized you all. But this is something that we need to correct for the sake of unity and accuracy. And that's what they ended up doing. And this is how that custom kind of started to get settled.
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B
Okay, interesting.
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C
Which is a nice model, not of Augustine himself, but of what he started by just bringing these two into conversation with each other and being a witness for the goodness of universal unity. Because it's so easy to get used to the way that we do things in my house or in my parish or in my state or the US or whatever, and then to go see somebody else and go, what are you doing? You're nuts. Right. Why do you have that problem? That's a dumb problem to have without understanding and also without the actual purpose of unity and faithfulness in the middle. So I love.
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B
That's a beautiful example.
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C
I think that's a fun example.
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B
Yes. Was there anything else from the Celtic Church? The history and that integration that we still have today from that missionary unity of bringing them closer into the practices of the Romans?
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C
The most important and most universal one really, is confession. Because you had periods in the early church, kind of in Rome and Jerusalem and Alexandria and elsewhere, where people might do a private confession to a priest. Oftentimes it was public, but they might do a private confession to a priest, but then their penance was public. Right. And if you were doing penance, you had to sit in the back, or you had to wear sackcloth, or you had to always be lying on your stomach. And you weren't allowed to sing at the singing parts of the Mass.
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B
Right.
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C
You had to keep Your mouth shut and these were all signs of your penance and penitence. But the Celtic practice was a lot more. Had a lot more to do with dealing with the sin and then the healing of the person through penance. Not that other people didn't emphasize that, but that brought them to sort of emphasize the beauty of a seal and secrecy over confession so that people could get everything out and then receive private counsel. Right. As to what they should do and then a particular penance. So nobody else is looking around, watching, going, oh, this week he's in the back. Wonder what he did.
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B
No singing for you.
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C
I'll go ask around. Yeah, exactly, yeah, no singing for you. Right, interesting. And that's one of the. That's probably the most enduring and to the current practice of the Church today, the most important, I would say.
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B
Absolutely.
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C
There were some other things as well, but that's a really big one.
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B
Okay, thank you. And out of curiosity, I was telling Dr. Perthor earlier that I was, you know, I know St. Augustine of Canterbury mostly because I read the Canterbury Tales in high school. So is there any connection between, you know, that great poem and St. Augustine? Besides, it's the same location of where he lived and grew up and just represents that potent spirit.
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C
It's the same location in the Canterbury Tales. They're going to. They're going on pilgrimage to a shrine of a different saint who was killed in Canterbury. But Canterbury was the capital of Kent, which is where this King Ethelbert was to whom he had been sent to convert. And so that became a sort of massive mainstay. And it's, you know, in the history of the Church. It's sad because of course, Canterbury, we think about the Archbishop of Canterbury now, meaning the head of the non Catholic English Church or the Church of England. And actually the shrine and Relics of St Augustine of Canterbury were destroyed in the reformation in the 1500s.
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B
I didn't know that.
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C
And only in 2012 was a new shrine erected to him in Canterbury itself. There's been one somewhere else, but only in 2012 was, at least from what I could see, searching around, was a shrine erected again to him in Canterbury itself.
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B
Interesting. Very good. Is there any other interesting insight about St Augustine of Canterbury that you'd like to share?
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C
That's when I've gone, that's great. Yeah. Just don't forget about this great saint. And if you've got English ancestry, thank him.
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B
And Irish too, a little bit. He helped bring us in the herd.
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C
That's right. Yeah.
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B
Well, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for joining us as well. And St Augustine of Canterbury pray for us.
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A
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