Saint Boniface

Saint Boniface, who was baptized with the name Winfrid, was an Anglo-Saxon monk who became a bishop and a missionary to the Germanic peoples. He has gone down in history as the apostle of Germany: he organized the Church in Hesse, Thuringia, and Bavaria, governed the see of Mainz, and died a martyr in Frisia. The Church commemorates him on June 5.

He was born around 675 in Wessex, into an Anglo-Saxon family. He entered a monastery at a very young age and later was a monk of the abbey of Nursling. He taught Latin grammar, wrote treatises and poems in Latin, and at about the age of thirty he was ordained a priest. England, to which Pope Gregory the Great had sent monks led by Saint Augustine less than a hundred years earlier, was by then itself sending missionaries to the continent.

In 716 Winfrid sailed to Frisia with a few companions, but the opposition of the local ruler forced him to return. Undiscouraged, he went to Rome. Pope Gregory II gave him the name Boniface and in 719 entrusted him by letter with a mission among the Germanic peoples, and in 722 the pope himself ordained him a bishop. According to the saint’s first biographer, Willibald, at Geismar in Hesse Boniface felled a huge oak venerated by the pagans and from its wood built a chapel in honor of Saint Peter.

Gregory III named him archbishop, sent him the pallium, and gave him the authority to appoint bishops. Boniface founded dioceses and monasteries, convened synods, and as papal legate renewed the Church in the kingdom of the Franks. He brought monks and nuns from England to help him, among them Saint Lioba. The abbey of Fulda, founded around 743, was especially dear to him. He made three pilgrimages to Rome and all his life guarded unity with the Successor of Saint Peter. His letters, a textbook of Latin grammar, and poems have come down to us.

Nearly eighty years old, he set out with a group of about fifty monks for Frisia, where he had once begun his mission. Beforehand he asked his disciple and successor at Mainz, Bishop Lull, to complete the building of the basilica at Fulda and to bury him there. On June 5, 754, at Dokkum, where he was to confirm the newly baptized, an armed band of pagans attacked them. Boniface forbade his companions to fight and was killed together with them. The Roman Martyrology names Bishop Eoban among them.

After many vicissitudes Boniface’s body was brought to Fulda and buried there; pilgrims still visit his tomb today. He was venerated as a saint immediately after his death: Cuthbert, Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote shortly after the martyrdom that a synod of the Church in England had decided to celebrate his day solemnly every year. Boniface lived long before canonization processes existed; the Church has venerated him as a saint for centuries. In 1954, on the twelfth centenary of his martyrdom, Pius XII devoted the encyclical Ecclesiae fastos to him.