Confessor Honorius

Saint Honorius, listed in the martyrologies as a bishop and confessor, was the fifth Archbishop of Canterbury and one of the principal figures of the Roman mission to the Anglo-Saxons in the seventh century. Almost nothing can be established about the date or circumstances of his birth. He was a Roman by origin and a monk, later counted among the Benedictines, and is generally described as a disciple of Pope Gregory the Great, though it is not certain whether he crossed to England with Augustine in 597 or arrived with a later party of missionaries. His recorded life belongs wholly to the English church; no independent Italian career is documented.

When Archbishop Justus died in 627, Honorius was chosen to succeed him at Canterbury. Because the English hierarchy was still sparse, he was consecrated at Lincoln by Paulinus, bishop of York, rather than by suffragans of his own province. In 634 Pope Honorius I sent him the pallium, the woollen vestment that marked metropolitan jurisdiction, and addressed letters (preserved by Bede) to both Honorius of Canterbury and Paulinus of York, directing that when either metropolitan see fell vacant the surviving archbishop should consecrate the successor, so that the English church would not have to wait upon a journey to Gaul or Rome. Honorius in turn consecrated Ithamar as bishop of Rochester, the first man of English birth to occupy an English see, and later provided for the East Anglian church. After King Edwin’s death and the collapse of the first Northumbrian mission, he received the refugee Paulinus and appointed him to Rochester, thereby keeping a senior Roman-trained bishop within the southern kingdom of Kent.

Honorius’s long tenure, from the late 620s until 653, was a period of consolidation rather than of dramatic new conversions. Kent remained Christian under its kings, and Canterbury’s authority was acknowledged in neighbouring kingdoms even while the Northumbrian church was being refounded under Aidan on a different, Irish monastic model. Honorius maintained the link with Rome and helped to secure a native clergy without leaving a body of sermons, legislation, or miracle stories of his own. The principal contemporary witness is Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, together with the papal correspondence Bede transcribed; later medieval writers added little that can be independently verified.

He died on 30 September 653 and was buried in the monastery church of Saints Peter and Paul outside the walls of Canterbury, the house later known as St Augustine’s Abbey, beside Augustine, Laurence, Mellitus, and Justus. He was succeeded by Deusdedit, the first archbishop of English parentage. Veneration of Honorius as a saint and confessor grew from that tomb and belongs to the pre-congregation period; no formal papal act of canonization is recorded. His feast is kept on 30 September, the traditional date of his death, in the Roman Martyrology and in some Anglican calendars. No securely attested list of special patronages is attached to him, and later legend did not surround his life with the miracle cycles that grew around some of his contemporaries.