Post #5950

The preaching of the celestial doctrine confirmed with many miracles, together with the example of life, he gained in this way the islanders, who led many of them to embrace the faith of Christ, and finally the same king, who received baptism together with a great number of his followers, with supreme joy of the queen Bertha his wife, who was Christian. Conferring once in the Christmas of the Lord the baptism to more than ten thousand people on the shores of the river passing York, it is narrated that all those who had some illness received together with the health of the soul also the one of the body. Ordained bishop in 596 by order of St. Gregory the Great, he established is See in Canterbury in the church of the Saviour that he himself had raised, and he posed there some monks that would help him in his work; moreover he built in the suburbs the monastery of St. Peter, which then also bore his name. In 601 the same Pope St. Gregory the Great he accorded him the use of the pallium, that raised him to the archiepiscopal and primatial dignity, with faculty of establishing in England the ecclesiastical hierarchy: and he also sent him a new handful of workers, namely Mellitus, Justus, Paulinus and Rufianus. Regulated the things of his church, Augustine reunited the synod of the bishops and doctors of the ancient Britons, for a long time discordant with the Roman Church on the celebration of Easter and other rites. But not having been able to induce them to cease the quarrel either with the authority of the Apostolic See or with miracles, with a prophetic spirit he predicted their ruin. Finally, after having endured many labours for Christ, famous for miracles, after having placed Mellitus in charge of the church in London, Justus in that of Rochester, Lawrence in his, he went to heaven on May 26, 604, reigning Aethelbert, and was buried in the monastery of San Pietro, which later became the burial of the archbishops of Canterbury and several kings. The English made him a fervent cult; and the Supreme Pontiff Leo XIII extended the cult to the whole Church to implore the return of England to the Roman Church, setting the feast on May 28th.