St. Ansgar

Their story

Ansgar was born in 801 near Amiens, in what is now France. His mother died when he was young, and he was sent to be educated by the Benedictine monks of Corbie. He became a monk himself and taught at the monastery school, first at Corbie and then at its new daughter house of Corvey in Saxony. In 826 the king of Denmark, who had been baptized, asked for a missionary to come north with him, and Ansgar volunteered. Scandinavia was still pagan, and the work was hard and dangerous. He later went to Sweden, where he built the first Christian church there. In 831 he was named the first archbishop of Hamburg, with responsibility for spreading the Gospel through all of northern Europe. In 845 Viking raiders burned Hamburg to the ground, destroying his church, his library and years of work. Ansgar did not give up. He later became archbishop of Bremen and Hamburg together and went back to Denmark and Sweden to begin again. Ansgar was known as a gentle man of deep prayer who lived simply, cared for the poor and the sick, and worked to free people who had been captured and sold as slaves. He died in Bremen on February 3, 865. After his death, much of Scandinavia returned to paganism, and it was nearly two centuries before the Christian faith took firm root there. Yet he is remembered as the "Apostle of the North," a patron for everyone who keeps sowing seeds of faith without seeing the harvest.