You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints.

This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute,

an Apostolate helping Catholics understand, live, and share their faith.

Welcome to Catholic Saints. My name is Mary McGee. I work here at the Gusson Institute, and today I am joined with Dr. James Pothro, Professor of Biology and Sacred Scripture. Is that correct?

That is very correct. Thanks so much, Mary, for having me on.

Thank you for joining us. So this series is to talk about the lives of the saints,

what we can learn about our friends in heaven to be sources of inspiration for us today and our own

journey. Today we can talk about St. Augustine of Canterbury. I personally know a little about

the saint. So what are just some biographical information that we should know about the saint?

So really basic, and we can come back to any of this that's interesting, but really, really basic.

So St. Augustine of Canterbury was born in, he was a saint in the sort of five hundreds and died in the early six hundreds in Great Britain.

And he was bishop at Canterbury, which is in Kent, which is in England.

You can go over there today, of course.

But he's called the Apostle to the English because he was sent by Pope Gregory I to evangelize

the Anglo-Saxons there.

There were already lots of Christians in the area who had been Christianized through the

Roman Empire, but then the Romans had pulled all their legions out in the 400s, and there

were all these sort of Irish and Celtic Christians on the one side,

and then a whole bunch of pagans in the middle, sort of separating all of the Christians

from the European side, on the eastern side of the British Isles.

And they were really isolated, and there were a whole bunch of these pagans there.

Nobody was really missionizing them, revangelizing them.

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