BONIFACE, Saint, Martyr. - Apostle of Germany, b. around 675 in Wessex, in Britain. In his family he bore the name Wymfrith, and from childhood he felt a religious vocation, so that his parents allowed him to be educated in the abbey of Adescancastre (Exeter), from which he later passed to that of Nhutsselle (now Nursling). From pupil he became a teacher in the cloister, and began to receive missions of trust and assignments, which revealed his abilities.
It was the time when Irish and Gaelic monks were spreading throughout the world, and Wynfrith too was seized by the longing for the "peregrinatio pro Christo." Around 716, with some companions, he set out to reach the ports of Frisia, at the least suitable moment, because of the lively pagan reaction to the Catholic preaching of Willibrord. But, having arrived there, the hostility of the environment persuaded him to return to his convent of Nhutscelle. Two years later, in 718, he embarked again; but this time for Rome, to ask the Pope to be able to direct his work, in obedience and with the support of the Church, to the conversion of the pagans. From Rome, having been received there by Gregory II, he set out again with his name changed to that of the ancient Roman martyr B. (the change took place on 14 May) and provided with a bull in which the work he was going to carry out was authorized and recommended. From Thuringia, B. regained the country that had already once attracted his imagination and his heart, Frisia. He found it in conditions far more suited to welcoming his preaching, which he carried out in close agreement with Willibrord, bishop of Utrecht and evangelizer of Frisia. In Hesse, where paganism was still unchallenged, his apostolate was exercised, between 722 and 724, followed by a large harvest of conversions. Toward the end of 722 he was in Rome to report on the first results to the Pontiff, who consecrated him bishop, it seems on 30 Nov. of the same year, providing him with the broadest instructions and letters of recommendation. The first of these was for the powerful mayor of the palace of the Frankish kings, Charles Martel. On this occasion B. pronounced the famous oath of fidelity to the Holy See, the text of which is still preserved (ed. Tangl, in MGH, Epistulae, XVI, pp. 28-29). Having returned to Hesse, he resumed the struggle against idolatry; the felling of the oak of Donara Geismar (near Fritzlar), with which he then built a small church to St. Peter, contributed greatly to the spread of the Gospel.
Adjacent to Hesse, and likewise untouched by Roman civilization, Thuringia immediately afterward drew the Saint's attention. He spent ten years there, spreading among the populations the word of that God whom the zeal of St. Kilian and of some other Irish or Frankish missionary had not succeeded in making known. There he had to struggle bitterly against the ignorance of paganized priests, who had from the beginning perverted the work of evangelization entrusted to them. In 731 Gregory III honored B. with the archiepiscopal dignity, entrusting him with the task of establishing bishoprics in the countries of Germany most advanced in the faith. Between 734 and 735 the apostle extended his care as far as Bavaria, continuing there the work of St. Rupert, who had been its evangelizer. In the autumn of 737 B. set out for the third time on a journey to Rome. He went there before undertaking what he considered his supreme mission, the evangelization of Saxony, in order to receive instructions directly from the Pontiff. But in Rome other tasks were entrusted to him: the ecclesiastical organization of Germany, for which Gregory III gave him full powers to ordain and consecrate priests and bishops, to gather and preside over synods, to revise the constitution of the cloisters, nostrum agentum vicum, as the bull to the bishops of Bavaria and Germany expresses it (Gregory III, Epistola 44).
Then B. reorganized in Bavaria the dioceses of Salzburg, Regensburg and Freising and created that of Passau (738-39). The local clergy had to be purged; then, perhaps in 740, the first synod could be gathered. The following year, 741, B. went on to organize the churches of central Germany: one diocese for Hesse: and it was Buraburg (Bürberg); two for Thuringia: Würzburg and Erfurt. At the same time he erected two other bishoprics for the increased needs of Bavaria: Neuburg and Eichstätt, near which arose the monastery of Heidenheim. In 744, B. provided for his greatest monastic foundation: the abbey of Fulda, from which the most numerous band of missionaries would come and which would constitute the beacon of German culture in the early Middle Ages. This foundation was the dearest to B., so much so that he wished to be buried there.
But from as early as 742, following the death of Charles Martel and of Gregory III, a new task had been entrusted to him: the reform of the Frankish Church, which was in decline because of the corruption of morals and the frequency of interventions by the king and the great, because of the squandering of ecclesiastical property and the growing rarity of councils. Where strict subjection to the dynasty prevented active action by the central power of the Church, the new Pope, the Greek Zachary, directed the now well-known fervent zeal of the archbishop of Germany. His appointment had been requested from the Curia by the mayor of the palace of Austrasia, Carloman, who gave himself entirely to the reform of the clergy and the convocation of councils, drawing into them his reluctant brother, Pepin the Short of Neustria. With B. present, solemn councils confirmed the subordination of the churches of Austrasia to the archbishop of Germany, the necessity of providing for appointments to vacant bishoprics, the strict submission of priests to bishops, the frequency of synods, the education of the clergy, as far as concerned the reestablishment and respect of the hierarchy; while through a series of measures provision was made for the reestablishment of relaxed discipline and the aim was to ensure the return to the Church of goods improperly extorted. Having deposed some guilty bishops, those of Mainz, Gewiliob, of Neustria, Aldebert, and of Austrasia, Clement; having overcome difficulties and hostility even among the clergy, B. completed his work, consecrating, by the will of Pepin the Short, the archbishops of Reims, Rouen and Sens.
On his return to Germany, B. had to decide about his metropolitan see: archbishop of Austrasia from 742, his see was to be Cologne, according to the explicit assignment of the Council of 745. But the opposition of certain Frankish bishops, while it showed that the apostle had not succeeded in forming (perhaps because of the already established spirit of nationality and the contrast that over the centuries was to divide the two banks of the Rhine) a compact Franco-German ecclesiastical unity, led him to prefer Mainz, not yet erected as an archiepiscopal see. But as archbishop ad personam, he represented more than ever the authority of the Holy See in the Germanic countries, as legate a latere of the Pontiff, provided with the broadest powers.
The apostle had by now reached the end of his life. After consecrating King Pepin the Short in 750 — whose brother Carloman's withdrawal from the world allowed the union of Austrasia and Neustria into a single kingdom — and after obtaining from him the appointment of his faithful disciple Lull as his successor at Mainz, in 752 B. returned to conclude his life with preaching in Frisia, there where his exemplary activity had begun. He went there, at the age of eighty, in foreboding of his end, and having settled, by the immediate subjection of Utrecht to the Holy See, the question that had arisen between that bishopric and that of Cologne, he set about, with a few followers, to lead the idolaters of eastern Frisia to the faith, and there, while he was baptizing and confirming the neophytes, he was massacred with his companions by a crowd of pagans enraged by his practices, on 5 June 755. Carried first to Utrecht, then to Mainz, and finally to Fulda, his remains found burial there, in accordance with the apostle's wish.
One of the greatest figures of the period of the victorious expansion of the faith, B. converted Frisia, Hesse and Thuringia en masse; he carried out the evangelization of Bavaria and central Germany; he gave an organiz-
ecclesiastical organization to Germany; he reformed the Frankish Church. An energetic and capable achiever, he aroused around himself love and fervor, which together with that spirit of subjection of which he gave continuous proof in his relations with Rome, were essential foundations of the missionary method he established. A true apostle of the Roman character of the Church and a master of missionary activity, to which he dedicated his whole life, he knew how to lead the evanlization in accordance with the dictates of the British clergy, from Bede to his former bishop Daniel of Winchester, and giving for the first time a large share to religious women and to female monasteries. He laid the foundations of the cultural unity of Gaul and Germany, later completed by Charlemagne. A broad and humane vision, but no less austere for that, of life and religious discipline accompanied and guided his work: from which the hosts of missionaries who succeeded him drew inspiration as from the greatest example and the closest and dearest testimony. Feast on June 5.
Bibliography19 works
Pier Fausto Palumbo