St. Augustine became the first Archbishop of Canterbury in 597. Two years earlier when Pope Gregory the Great sent him as a missionary to England he told Augustine, "Do not pull down the temples. Destroy the idols; purify the temples with holy water, set relics there and let them become temples of the true God. So the people will have no need to change their places of gathering."
When Augustine built his cathedral at Canterbury, it doesn't seem to have been the site of an earlier temple, but there are other churches in England and Ireland and in other parts of the world that are built on sites of pagan worship. That worship would have made the site a holy place. "Holy" means set aside for God. Or possibly the pagans themselves chose the site because they sensed a special other-worldly air about it.
Pope Gregory's advice reminds me that Catholic means finding God in many different ways and in many different places.
This picture was taken in the crypt of the cathedral. It is the remains of an earlier Romanesque church upon which the present cathedral was built. The sculpture that seems to float in the air is made of nails and hangs over the spot where St. Thomas a Becket's body was originally enshrined before it was taken up in 1220 to the newly built Trinity Chapel. (Clicking on the picture enlarges it and makes it possible to see the floating body.)
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