ANSCARIO, saint. — Archbishop of Hamburg and Bremen, apostle of Scandinavia, born in 801 in northern France, died at Bremen on 3 February 865. He was educated in the monastery of Corbie in Picardy, where he took the monastic habit. His superiors called him to teach first in the monastery where he had begun his religious life, and then at New Corbie in Saxony, where another monastery had been founded. At the invitation of King Wala, he set out for Denmark together with Autbert, but had to leave it in 827 without having been able to erect a single church. In 829 the Swedish king Björn asked the emperor Ludovicus the Pious to send him missionaries, and A. went there together with his fellow religious Wittmar. In the spring of the following year they landed at Birka (Björkö), a small island in Lake Mälar, then the political and commercial centre of Sweden. Soon, however (831), they had to abandon the mission. Ludovicus the Pious, seeking to create a base for the apostolate among the northern peoples, having erected the diocese of Hamburg, independent of any metropolitan, chose A. as its first bishop. Gregory IV appointed him archbishop and his legate for all Scandinavia. Leaving Gaubert in Sweden, he reserved for himself, in addition to the care of the diocese, the apostolate in Denmark, but had to limit himself to recruiting and educating young Danes destined for the apostolate in their homeland. They were instructed either at Hamburg or in the monastery of Thourout (Flanders), whose revenues the emperor had assigned in 831 for the support of A.’s poor diocese.
With the Treaty of Verdun (843), Thourout fell under the rule of Charles the Bald, and A. lost, together with the monastery’s resources, his collaborators as well. The sack of Hamburg by the Normans in 843 destroyed the missions, and he was forced to leave the country. He became bishop of Bremen, to which the diocese of Hamburg was united. Having subsequently obtained freedom to preach, A. erected churches at Schleswig and Ribe. In 853 or 854 he reached Sigtuna to resume the missions in Sweden, where King Olaf granted freedom of worship. His disciple Rimbert succeeded him in the mission; he also succeeded him in the episcopal see after his death (3 February 865) and wrote his life. Political circumstances and the immense difficulties inherent in the undertaking meant that the success of A.’s apostolate was quite modest. Nevertheless, the fact remains that he laid solid foundations for Christianity at Birka, Schleswig, and Ribe, and definitively entrusted the legation
for the northern missions to the diocese of Hamburg-Bremen. Unfortunately, A.’s work had no immediate successors.