Homily for Memorial of St. Augustine of Canterbury

Homily for the Memorial of
St. Augustine of Canterbury

May 27, 2021
Collect
Psalm 33
Provincial House, New Rochelle, N.Y.

Today’s Collect notes simply that “the preaching of St. Augustine of Canterbury led the English peoples to the Gospel.”

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The story began, we’re told by the Venerable Bede, in a Roman slave market, where a monk named Gregory beheld some handsome fair-haired youths up for sale.  Asking who they were, he was informed that they were Angles from Britain, which had once been at the farthest reach of the Empire but had since been overrun by various Germanic tribes.  Gregory replied, admiringly, “Not Angles but angels”  He began to think about evangelizing Britain.

But he was called to papal diplomatic service and then to the papacy itself, in 590.  So any hope of a missionary career was finished.

But not Gregory’s dream of evangelizing England.  It took a few more years, but he organized a large band of monks from his old monastery of St. Andrew—40 of them, I recollect—and sent them on their way in 596 under the leadership of Augustine, their prior.

The journey thru Gaul was hazardous in that period often called the Dark Ages, but they persevered and reached the Saxon kingdom of Kent in southeast England in 597, where the local ruler, one Ethelbert, had a Christian wife from Gaul and received them favorably.  He bestowed land on them for a church and monastery, so the great establishment of Canterbury came to be.

Meanwhile, Gregory had made Augustine a bishop; Canterbury became the primatial see, as it remains for the Anglicans.  Augustine converted Ethelbert and had great success in preaching the Gospel thruout England’s southeast.  He created suffragan sees at London and Rochester.

He was less successful in another mission Gregory had given him.  You know that Christianity had come to Britain long before, when Rome ruled much of the island.  Think St. Patrick.  Those Celtic Christians had their own customs, including a different date for Easter, that Gregory hoped to reconcile with Roman usages.  Augustine was no diplomat, and reconciliation failed until decades after his death.  He died in the 1st decade of the new century, exact year uncertain.

Augustine’s legacy was a strong, vibrant Church that produced numerous saints, missionaries, and martyrs.  He enabled the Anglo-Saxon peoples of Britain, and the Jutes and Danes who followed their invasive trails, to “sing a new song” to the Lord (Ps 33:3) and to spread the word of the Lord’s kindness (33:5) thruout the island and back to still-pagan Europe—think St. Boniface.  Augustine and his monks and those they inspired helped “all the earth fear the Lord,” and “all who dwell in the world revere him” (33:8).

The rest of our Collect—its actual petition—was that “the fruits of his labors may remain ever abundant in your Church.”  That’s where we come in, continuing to preach the same Gospel, still living, that Augustine brought to England 1,424 years ago.