Abdington, near Oxford, famous in earlier days for its great Benedictene Abbey, was the birthplace of almost the last Englishman to be canonised before the English reformation. This was Edmund Rich, whose learning and holiness were so known throughout Christendom that he became Archbishop of Canterbury and, within six years of his death, Saint Edmund of Canterbury.

Edmund, first of four children, was born on the 20th of November (c 1180), on the Feast of St. Edmund, King and Martyr, and received the name of the great East Anglican Saint. He completed his early schooldays in England, but since neither Oxford nor Cambridge enjoyed their present reputation as great European universities, Edmund and his brother Robert crossed the Channel to study at the University of Paris.

He returned to Oxford as a lecturer, one of the first Masters of Arts to lecture in an English university, and he became Oxford's first Doctor of Divinity. Among his innovations at Oxford were the study of Aristotle's logic and the Scholastic Method.

It was while lecturing at Oxford that his mind turned towards the priestly vocation. His main preoccupation had been the study of mathematics until he saw in a vision his mother, who had died while he had been in Paris.  She appeared to draw three circles within which she wrote "Father, Son and Holy Ghost".

Edmund understood that he ought to give up the study of geometry in favor of theology.  He again studied in Paris, where he was eventually ordained. Those three circles drawn by his mother become the symbol of St. Edmund and those who work under his patronage.

Edmund's reputation as a preacher spread all over the world and, that he could devote himself to sacred eloquence, he was given the treasurership of Salisbury Cathedral. Incidentally, it was during his term of office that the present beautiful Cathedral was consecrated. When the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) proclaimed the sixth crusade for the recovery of the Holy Places, Pope Gregory IX appointed St. Edmund to be the preacher in the counties of Somerset, Gloucester, Hereford, Worcester and Oxford.

In 1234 St. Edmund was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury. His humility, charity and gentleness, interpreted perhaps as weakness by King Henry III, did not undermine his deep love of freedom and justice, and he fought vigourously for the rights of the Church against the encroachments of the King in ecclisiastical matters. Edmund was eventually forced to choose voluntary exile from England.

He was offered home in France at the holy precincts of the Abbey of Pontigny, in Burgundy. There he found peace but still not rest; he laboured incessently, writing and preaching, until his death on the 16th of November, 1240.  So many miracles happened through his intercession that Pope Innocent IV canonised him only six years ofter his death.

His body was the only legacy St. Edmund could leave to the monks who had befriended him, and it reposed in their care until they were driven from their Abbey by French revolutionaries. In 1843 a group of zealous priests pledged to do missionary work in the depleted parishes of France, made the Abbey their headquarters. To them was committed the custodianship of the sacred remains of the great English saint by the Archbishop of Sens, and fittingly, they chose him as their Holy Patron.  This group later became known as the Fathers of St. Edmund.

Many thousands of pilgrims make their way to Pontigny on his feast day, 16th of November, and on the feast of the Translation of the St. Edmund, which is the 9th of June.

The flow of English pilgrims to the shrine ceased with the reformation, but in 1873 Cardinal Manning led a national pilgrimage to St. Edmund's tomb, and in 1926 a pilgrimage on its way to Rome was halted there by Cardinal Bourne.

The Fathers of St. Edmund have houses in France, America, Canada, Whitton Middlesex, and the Brentwood Diocesan Travelling Misson, Stock, Essex.

If you would like to contribute to the History section, please contact us!  In addition to more information about St. Edmund himself, we are looking for someone that can provide research on our Parish, its founding, construction and contributions to the West Island of Montreal