Venerable Peter of Canterbury

CATEGORY CORRECTION: the previous category "hierarch" (bishop) was erroneous — Peter was never a bishop but an abbot of a monastery; the category has been corrected to "venerable." HONEST CAVEAT: the saint is absent from the list of 15 ancient Western saints approved by the ROC Synod in 2017, and has no dedicated pravenc.ru article — his veneration is chiefly within Celtic/British Orthodox tradition.

Venerable Peter of Canterbury (Latin: Petrus; d. c. 607) was an Italian monk and the first abbot of the monastery of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul at Canterbury, later renamed St. Augustine's Abbey. He was a monk of St. Andrew's monastery in Rome and was sent to England in 597 by Pope Gregory the Great as part of St. Augustine's Gregorian mission to the Anglo-Saxons.

In 601 he traveled to Rome with the priest Laurence and returned bearing Gregory's answers to Augustine's questions on organizing the new English Church. He became the first abbot of the Canterbury monastery. On a later mission to Gaul, he drowned in the English Channel near Ambleteuse, close to Boulogne.

According to Bede, local inhabitants initially buried him without honor, but after a mysterious nightly light appeared over the grave, his relics were solemnly translated to a church in Boulogne.