Carolingian era (9th century)
Feast: February 3
He built churches in Denmark and Sweden. The Vikings burned them down. He went back and built them again.
Ansgar had visions as a child — one of them told him he would die a martyr's death. He spent his whole life hoping for it, and it never came. What came instead was something arguably harder: repeated failure. As a monk at Corbie in Picardy, he was sent to Denmark around 826 to support the newly baptized King Harald. He opened a school. The mission collapsed when Harald was overthrown. Ansgar went to Sweden next, establishing a church at Birka, the trading center on Lake Malaren. That mission failed too when political winds shifted. Pope Gregory IV made him Archbishop of Hamburg with jurisdiction over all of Scandinavia — a grand title over a mostly imaginary diocese. Then, in 845, a Viking fleet sailed up the Elbe and burned Hamburg to the ground, including Ansgar's cathedral and library. He had to start from scratch, merging his ruined see with Bremen. Most men would have given up on the North. Ansgar went back to Denmark. He went back to Sweden. He negotiated with kings, ransomed slaves, and built small churches that he knew might not survive his departure. When asked about the miracles attributed to him, he said, 'The greatest miracle God could work in me would be to make me a good man.' He died in Bremen in 865, of natural causes, still hoping for the martyrdom that never arrived.