Pope St. Gregory refuses to let frightened monks abandon the journey to England

ROME, 596 AD — About forty monks whom Pope Saint Gregory the Great sent from Rome this year to preach to the English lost their nerve on the road through Gaul and sent their leader back to Rome to ask that they be excused. St. Gregory refused. In a letter of July 23 he ordered the monks to finish what they had begun. The same letter made their leader, until then the deputy head of the Pope’s own monastery, their abbot.

St. Gregory has been Bishop of Rome since 590 AD. The monks came from St. Andrew’s, the monastery St. Gregory had made out of his family’s house on the Caelian Hill. Their leader, Saint Augustine of Canterbury, was its prior and the Pope’s close friend. The order that had sent them was St. Gregory’s, and only he could withdraw it.

St. Gregory believed the English wanted to become Christians and that the priests nearest them, across the sea in Gaul, were neglecting them. In the autumn of 595 AD he told the priest who managed the Roman Church’s estates in Gaul to spend the rents there on clothes for the poor and on buying English slave boys of about seventeen or eighteen. The boys were to be sent to Rome and brought up as monks, and a priest was to travel with them and baptize any who seemed about to die on the road. Boys like that would take years to train, and St. Gregory’s health was very bad. Because he might die before the boys were ready to preach, St. Gregory sent monks from St. Andrew’s at once.

The monks left Rome by the Ostian Gate with St. Augustine at their head. St. Gregory had already chosen St. Augustine to be consecrated bishop if the English received them.

In southern Gaul, the monks’ courage failed. People there still remembered the Saxon raids, and they told the monks that the English were worse than wild beasts and tortured and killed anyone who preached the Christian faith. None of the monks could speak a word of English. The monks agreed among themselves that turning back was safer. They sent St. Augustine to Rome to ask the Pope humbly not to make them go on with so dangerous, hard and uncertain a journey.

A monk owed his abbot obedience. He could ask to be excused, but he could not turn back on his own. St. Gregory enforced the Rule of Saint Benedict as he reformed the monasteries, and the Rule punished a monk who went anywhere without his abbot’s permission. The abbot stood in the place of Christ, and there was no appeal from his decision. A monk given a task beyond his strength might say so, humbly and patiently, but if his superior insisted he was to obey at once and trust in God’s help.

St. Augustine travelled back to Rome and put the monks’ case to the Pope. St. Gregory would not let the mission drop. He gave St. Augustine a letter for the monks, addressed from “Gregory, the servant of the servants of God, to the servants of our Lord.” St. Gregory wrote: “Since it had been better not to have begun what is good than to return back from it when begun, you must, most beloved sons, fulfil the good work which with the help of the Lord you have begun. Let, then, neither the toil of the journey nor the tongues of evil-speaking men deter you; but with all instancy and all fervour go on with what under God’s guidance you have commenced, knowing that great toil is followed by the glory of an eternal reward.”

St. Gregory went on to name their commander: “When Augustine, your Superior, returns, whom we also constitute your abbot, humbly obey him in all things.” Until that day St. Augustine had been a prior, a deputy appointed by the abbot and bound to obey like any other monk. Now he was their abbot, with full authority over every man among them, so that they would hold together and not lose their nerve a second time.

St. Gregory, about fifty-six and often ill, ended the letter by telling the monks he could not go with them: “May Almighty God protect you with His grace, and grant to me to see the fruit of your labour in the eternal country; that so, even though I cannot labour with you, I may be found together with you in the joy of the reward; for in truth I desire to labour. God keep you safe, most beloved sons.”

At the same time St. Gregory asked the bishop of Arles to give St. Augustine every help on his way. St. Gregory wrote to the two boy kings of the Franks, aged ten and seven, and to their grandmother, the queen. He also wrote to bishops along the route, and he told the monks to take Franks with them as interpreters.

St. Augustine carried the letter back to the monks, and they went on. In 597 AD St. Augustine and his companions, nearly forty men, landed on the Isle of Thanet off the coast of Kent.