Churches and Monasteries

The writing prompt for this blog always says, "Add a Catchy Title." For me, that's the hardest bit. What is catchy about churches and monasteries? Probably nothing at all unless you are really into religion, like my friends who are priests! But this post is about the state of the church in the time period of "Bound by an Oath". In other words, it's about the churches and monasteries that already existed when the Romans left Britannia.

For us, looking back at Christianity through the telescope of two millennia, we tend to think that what we see now is what has always been. We know a lot more about the Protestant Reformation than we do about the earliest days of Christianity.

One thing that needs to be emphasized is that Christianity existed in Britain, before St Augustine was sent by the Pope to “establish” the church there in 597.

Christianity was established in parts of what we now call the British Isles, by the Celts. In fact, there were many small monastic settlements in Roman Britain – for example Skellig Michael, which was a series of small stone beehive-like buildings on the remote Skellig Islands.

The Irish monks spread Christianity into Cornwall, Wales, and Scotland. St. Ninian established a monastery at Whithorn in Scotland in about 400 AD. In 563 AD St. Columba took twelve men with him from Ireland and established a monastery in Iona.

And churches, albeit very modest buildings where Christians met to worship, have been around for almost the full span of the Christian era. The oldest church building still in use in England is St. Martin’s parish church, near Canterbury, which was built before St Augustine’s mission to the British by the Saxon King Æthelberht, for his Christian wife, Bertha.

As most of us know, Christianity began in the first century as small communities sprang up around the Mediterranean, devoted to remembering the obscure Jewish prophet, teacher and healer, Jesus of Nazareth. These earliest “Christians” worshipped in house churches.

At first these groups of Christians were subjected to intense persecution, but Christianity became a legal religion in pagan Rome in 313AD with the Edict of Milan, the joint effort of Emperors Constantine and Lucinius. There were already at least four churches (basilica) in Rome, by that time. And there were religious communities of monks and nuns, too.

When Rome was sacked in 410, Emperor Honorius and Pope Innocent were both sheltering on the coast in Ravenna. At that time the capital of the western Roman Empire was transferred to Ravenna, and that is where our monk Paulos spent the majority of his adult life.

Today Ravenna is a UNESCO World Heritage site. You can see examples of Christian churches of the 5th and 6th centuries with gorgeous mosaics, and the mausoleum of a barbarian king! (There is also a Museum of Pasta, if that is more to your liking!) What you will not find in Ravenna is the graveyard of Fra Paulos of Ravenna, who is a figment of my writer’s imagination. In the fashion of a humble servant of God, Paulos was buried in a simple graveyard beside the monastery.

Every year I make a pilgrimage to the humble grave of Br. Thomas Merton which is located at Gethsemane, near Bardstown, Kentucky. We spend the day in the peace and tranquility of the monastery, attend the midday service, and walk the grounds. Br. Thomas of Kentucky (RIP) provided at least some of the inspiration for Fra Paulos and his community in fifth century Ravenna.