At this time a significant and fiercely debated question arose about the celebration of Easter: those Christians from Kent or France claimed that the Irish celebrated Easter on a day differently than the custom of the universal church…. This had the unfortunate consequence that Easter was celebrated twice every year in England, and sometimes when the king, having ended his fast, was celebrating Easter, the queen and her followers were still fasting on Palm Sunday…. This reached the ears of the rulers, King Oswy and his son Alchfrid … who decided that this and other ecclesiastical questions should be settled once and for all at a council. The kings, both father and son, came there, and the bishops, the priests, and an interpreter….
King Oswy first made an opening speech in which he said that it was proper for those who served one God to observe one rule of life, and as they all expected the same kingdom in heaven, so they should not differ in the celebration of the heavenly mysteries. Rather, they should inquire which was the truer tradition, so that it might be followed by everyone together….
Wilfrid, having been ordered by the king to speak, began in this way: “The Easter which we keep, we saw celebrated by all at Rome, where the blessed Apostles, Peter and Paul, lived, taught, suffered, and were buried; we saw the same done by all in Italy and in France, when we traveled through those countries for the purpose of study and prayer. We found it observed in Africa, Asia, Egypt, Greece, and all the world, wherever the Church of Christ is spread abroad, among different nations and tongues, at one and the same time; save only among those here and those who join them in their stubbornness—the Picts and the Britons, in these remote islands of the ocean, and only in part of these islands, who foolishly insist on contradicting all the rest of the world.”…
To this Colman rejoined…. “Are you suggesting that our most reverend Father Columba and his successors, men beloved by God, who kept Easter after the same manner, judged or acted contrary to the sacred writings? On the contrary, there were many among them, whose holiness was affirmed by heavenly signs and miracles which they worked, whom I, for my part, do not doubt to be saints, and whose life, customs, and discipline I never cease to follow.”…
Wilfrid responded, “If that Columba of yours (and, I may say, ours also, if he was Christ’s servant) was a holy man and powerful in miracles, yet could he be preferred before the most blessed chief of the Apostles, to whom our Lord said, ‘You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it, and I will give to you the keys of the kingdom of Heaven’?”
When Wilfrid had ended thus, the king said, “Is it true, Colman, that these words were spoken to Peter by our Lord?” He answered, “It is true, O king!” Then said he, “Can you show any such power given to your Columba?” Colman answered, “None.”… Then the king concluded, “And I also say unto you, that he is the doorkeeper, and I will not decide against him, but I desire, as far as I know and am able, in all things to obey his laws, for if I do otherwise, I may come to the gates of the kingdom of Heaven, and there should be none to open them, since I have made an enemy of the one who has the keys.”
The king having said this, all who were seated there or standing by, both great and small, gave their assent, and renouncing the less perfect custom, quickly accepted the better one.
St. Augustine of Canterbury (d. 604)
Although we know little or no personal detail about the life of St. Augustine of Canterbury, we do know that there would probably never have been an English Church without him. From the sources we get the impression of an unassuming man content to work quietly in the fields, patiently building an edifice that would dominate the English landscape for over a millennium.
Although Christian missionaries had reached the native Britons in England by the early fourth century, the Church there was in tatters by the sixth. The withdrawal of Roman legions in 410 to protect the Imperial capital had led to an immediate invasion by the Saxons, as ruthless in their pagan religion as in their barbaric behavior. The few Christians who lingered among the now-conquered Britons were disheartened and gave up all hope of convincing their conquerors to accept the Gospel. While the Irish had some luck missionizing the northern coasts, they could not penetrate the interior. It seemed that all hope for a Christian England was lost.
Yet that great missionary pope, St. Gregory the Great, would not be daunted. A legend traces his brainchild of an English mission to an encounter with English slaves in a Roman slave market: Gregory nourished a lifelong scheme to buy slaves, free them, convert them, and send them back to their homelands as missionaries. Struck with the beauty of the fair-haired English, Gregory was horrified to hear that they had no missionaries among them. He thus hatched the most carefully conceived and well-organized missionary strategy since the days of St. Paul, forming a missionary team of forty handpicked monks from his own Roman abbey under the leadership of Augustine, their prior at the time.
Augustine was the right man for the job. His sharp wit, his delicate pastoral touch, and the natural knack for administration he had shown as prior would all be necessary in the mission field. Augustine’s first task was to establish a support network in the nearest Christian community, bringing his team to France to gather resources, including interpreters and local information. His next task was to rally the spirits of his team: the horror stories they heard in France of the savageries of the Saxons made the team unwilling to go on!
Next, after convincing the team to continue, he carefully plotted out the mission strategy. It may have been Augustine’s choice to begin the mission in Kent, where rumor had it that the local king, Ethelbert, was sympathetic to Christianity, having wed a Christian wife. Plus, situated next to the channel, Kent would put the team in close geographical proximity to its French support network. Augustine’s tactic of working closely with the royal couple meant it was only a matter of time before the king—with the gentle pressure of his wife—converted, and once the king converted, so would the nation. Within a year Augustine was able to baptize ten thousand Saxons in a Christmas ceremony.
From this point onward, Augustine left a profound legacy in the English Church. He fostered a strong devotion to the pope among the English—in fact, he considered his team an extension of the papacy itself, constantly asking the pope for advice on missionary strategies. A Benedictine monk himself, he quickly built a monastery on English soil, and with it a school for training missionaries, laying the foundations for an English monastic and missionary tradition that would reshape Europe.
His correspondence shows a profound sensitivity to local customs and a willingness to allow English Christianity to take its own distinctive cultural shape, rather than be supplanted by Roman Christianity. Perhaps he learned from his own mistakes: his failure to stand up to greet Irish missionaries during a meeting, probably due to his Roman aristocratic background, was a huge cultural faux pas and caused a decades-long schism between the Roman and Irish churches. Nonetheless, the Apostle to the English has always been seen as the founder of Christianity in England and a model missionary.
The Launching of the English Mission
Bede, an English monastic scholar, tells of how Pope Gregory the Great first conceived of the plan for a mission to England, its rocky start, and its gradual successes. (From Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People)
Around AD 596, Gregory, a man famous for his holy life and solid education, became bishop of Rome, an office he held for over thirteen years. Through divine inspiration, he sent that servant of God, Augustine, along with several other God-fearing monks, to preach the word of God to the English nation.
But as soon as they had begun that work in obedience to the pope’s commands, they suddenly were seized with fear and planned to return home, terrified of proceeding