St. Augustine of Canterbury

A Benedictine monk of Rome sent in 596 by Pope Gregory the Great to evangelize the pagan English, Augustine landed in Kent with forty companions, expecting martyrdom. Instead he baptized King Ethelbert and became the first Archbishop of Canterbury. The cathedral see he founded remains the senior bishopric of England to this day.

Gregory had famously seen Anglo-Saxon slaves in the Roman market and declared them "not Angles but angels." The mission he conceived and Augustine carried out established a pattern of evangelization through royal courts that would shape Northern Europe for centuries. Augustine founded a monastery at Canterbury and consecrated bishops for London and Rochester.

His methods were marked by a pastoral gentleness that Gregory had counseled: rather than destroy pagan temples, he was instructed to convert them into churches, and to transform pagan festivals into Christian feasts. He died around 604, and his work was completed by successors who brought all of England into the faith within a century of his arrival.