September 24 -- Feast of Saint Theodore of Canterbury

Theodore was said to be the greatest Archbishop of Canterbury between Augustine (the first) and Lafranc(the thirty-sixth). Apparently he was even better than Sigeric the Serious (twenty-eighth).  Still there are only two things to know about him. 

St. T. of C.

The first thing is that he was the loser of a decade long game of Not-It.  His consolation prize?  The mitre and crozier of Canterbury, England in AD 668, at age 66. Why, you might reasonably ask, was this such an undesirable appointment? Consider the following.

• England had been cut loose from the Roman Empire about fifty years before the barbarian hordes swept into the Eternal City itself.  Other barbarian hordes (Angles and Saxons and Jutes, oh my!) had been pouring into Britain and the Romans could not longer afford to defend it.  
• England was made up of a lot of little kingdoms, ruled over by a lot of petty kings, making open warfare pretty much the norm.  
• The English celebrated Easter according to a calendar not used in Rome, leading to the sort of suspicion that occasionally broke out into charges of heresy and the drawing of weapons (or quartering of heretics).  
• The monks cut their tonsures funny (as if the other tonsures look good) and felt about as amenable to aligning that practice as they did about Easter.  
• English weather. 
• English cooking. 
• Learning the English language.  

 Archbishop Deusdedit had died in AD 655 on the same day that King Earconbert of Kent died.  It took King Egbert of Kent and King Oswy of Northumberland nine years to settle on a candidate for replacement.  [Oswy had summoned the Synod of Whitby which accepted the Roman church practices rather than the Celtic, leading to the mini-schism at Lindisfarne.]

St. T of C

So their man Wigbert (or maybe Wigheard) set out for Rome to get his pallium, but died of the plague when he got there.  Pope Vitalian asked Hadrian (Adrian) to go, but he thought Andrew would be better.  Andrew thought not, so Theodore was the next to get tapped.  He agreed, but insisted that Hadrian go with him anyway, since he had been there before and spoke English.

The second thing is that even though he was sixty-eight when he started, he set up a very vigorous administration, trucking through all the little English kingdoms, seeing that they knew when Easter was, filling the vacant offices, and generally building up the Church.  He put that miserable Wilfrid, Archbishop of York in his place by getting Bishop Chad his own diocese but then busting Wilfrid's into three.  Wilfrid stomped off to whine to the Pope, but came back to York with orders to shut up, paste on a smile, and take what he was given.   Theodore held a couple of synods to get all the bishops, abbots, and parish priests on board.  And he and Hadrian taught Latin, Greek, science, and math at the Canterbury monastery, putting twenty-one years on the job, dying at age 88.