Parish Lenten Mission Conference I: "The Land of the Angels"
Our Sermon Series for this year’s Parish Lenten Mission is entitled: “Themes in English Catholicism: From the Mission of Saint Augustine of Canterbury to the Elizabethan Settlement, 597-1564 A.D.”
The Catholic Religion is a universal religionone and the same for everyone–but it also has its peculiarities and varying textures as it finds itself accepted into the hearts of the world’s diverse peoples. The Catholic Religion “inculturates” itself, we may say, in its mission. This does not mean that it dilutes itself nor that mixes-in with already existing religions or spiritual understandings to become a hybrid, for it does neither. What it does is it plants itself adaptively, and then when a new place receives the Gospel the people there forge something freshly new in the life of Catholic Christianity.
So it was with the conversion of Britannia in the Seventh Century of our Christian era A.D. There emerged from that evangelization a distinctive “English Catholicism” of which we American Catholics are very much the inheritors, although we hardly think of ourselves as such!
We begin our story with the Mission of St. Augustine in the year 597 A.D. This is a different St. Augustine than the St. Augustine of the “Confessions” and the son of St. Monica. That St. Augustine of Hippo was from Roman Africa. He died in 430 A.D. Our St. Augustine here is the one known as St. Augustine of Canterbury, England.
Back in 410 A.D., Rome had abandoned its territory of Britannia, under the pressures of external enemies and internal collapse. In short order the Romano-British world was destroyed. Invaders from Scandinavia and Germany drove the British west, towards Wales and Cornwall. There were new kingdoms now of these heathen barbarian tribes over most of Britain: the Kingdoms of the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes.
One day in Rome, Pope Gregory I (Gregory the Great), was struck by the sight of fair-haired war captives in the Roman slave-market. When he asked who these foreigners were, he was told that they were Angles. Then the Pope made a prediction: that one day these “Angles” would become “Angels”.
For the new mission to conquered Britannia, Pope Gregory turned to the Benedictine monastery of St. Andrew on the Coelian Hill at Rome, wherein he, Gregory, had once been a monk. He commissioned the Prior–Augustine–and forty of the monks to go to preach the Gospel in Britannia. The year was 596 A.D.
The missionaries set out as far as Provence in the south of France. Hearing of what fate likely awaited them among these fierce peoples and the dangers of crossing the Channel they tried to turn back, but Pope Gregory insisted they go on. He would not let them return.
After securing interpreters from among the Franks, Augustine and his missionary band landed on the Isle of Thanet off the coast of Kent, where the barbarian King Ethelbert ruled.
They disembarked, carrying a silver cross as their standard and a painting of Jesus Savior. They sent word to the King of their arrival and their purpose in coming. In reply he ordered them to stay where they were.
After a few days he came to Thanet and gave them audience. The King insisted they meet in the open. (He was afraid that these foreign wizards might use spells on him, which, he reasoned, could not work in the open air.) The King then sat under an oak tree. Augustine, through his interpreter, began to speak. Ethelbert, favorably touched, gave them leave to preach to his people and convert whom they could. But for himself, he was not ready to abandon all that he held sacred.
That was the opening the Holy Ghost needed. It was on Pentecost of the Year 597 that King Ethelbert and many of his nobles received Baptism at the hands of Augustine. Then on Christmas Day of that same Year, Augustine baptized upwards of 10,000 Angles in a river near York.
The prediction of Pope Gregory thus turned out to be a prophecy. The “Angles”, receiving the Christian Gospel, were indeed becoming “Angels”, so much so that this transformation has been marked ever since by the new country name given to Britannia. That name we know so well is “England”, which is an abbreviation of “Engelland”–or, to use modern English: “Angel-land”.