Not English but angels

IN 1905 a book on Gregory the Great: His Place in History and Thought was published.
In the coming week we celebrate the feast of Pope Gregory I whose impact on England was so great. As a monk himself he sent the Benedictine St Augustine to Canterbury, the first of a great family of Benedictines from 597 until the present day.
King Alfred, who burned the cakes, caused Pope Gregory's book Pastoral Care to be translated into English. Such care has been a mark of the English Benedictine tradition in this country over the centuries, from the times when Canterbury and Westminster Abbey were among the countless monasteries strewn across the land.
Most children have been told that Pope Gregory saw English slaves in Rome and praised their appearance as "Non angli sed Angeli." (Not English but Angels — mistranslated as "Not Anglicans but Angels.").
Now we can look back from this day when the head of the English hierarchy is a Benedictine monk to the first Archbishop in the land. Only about five years ago the present Benedictine Cardinal Archbishop travelled widely to celebrate the Benedictine Year, the 15th centenary of the birth of their Founder.
This year had a special interest, reflecting the occasion when the Cardinal joined in the Divine Office with his fellow monks at Westminster Abbey, there was a joyful Benedictine week of prayer and study in St Albans Abbey, the present Cathedral of that city.
These events remind one of the way in which St Augustine's spiritual descendants are coming closer together, very much through the leadership of his own Religious Order. Already in the Benedictine Year Book all the Anglican, Benedictine and Cistercian monks and nuns are listed by name with their Catholic counterparts. It is a back door to unity! St Gregory would have smiled graciously on it.
He would also have been interested in the recent statement in a book on the Benedictine Order in which the Dean of Canterbury's wife, Esther de Waal, wrote that the spirit of the Anglican church is based on the Benedictine tradition.
The whole history of the Middle Ages is linked up with the monastic tradition with its emphasis on education, farming, and care of the needy, but above all pastoral care of people.
This spirit was renewed 200 years ago when the Benedictine missionary spirit was so alive in the foundation of parishes in the North-East and North-West and the Midlands, and the rise of great new monasteries like Ampleforth, Downside and Douai.
It has now been seen that Benedictine monks make fine bishops, to judge by the two we have been privileged to have in Westminster diocese. Cardinal Hume has shown that a monk can be an excellent archbishop and gain such external recognition that he was for many years President of the European Conference of Bishops.