BONIFACE, Saint, Martyr. — Apostle of Germany, born about 675 in Wessex, Britain. His family name was Wynfrith, and from childhood he felt the religious vocation, so that his parents allowed him to be educated at the monastery of Adescancastre (Exeter), whence he passed on to that of Hutschelle (now Nürnling). From pupil he became a master in the cloister, and began to receive missions of trust and assignments that revealed his abilities.
It was the time when Irish and Gaelic monks were spreading throughout the world, and Wynfrith too was seized by the zeal of the “peregrinatio pro Christo.” Around 716, with some companions, he set out to reach, at the least opportune moment because of the fierce pagan reaction to the Catholic preaching of Willibrord, the Frisian ports. But upon arriving there, the hostility of the environment convinced him to return to his monastery of Nhutschelle. Two years later, in 718, he set sail again; this time for Rome, to ask the Pope for permission to direct his work, in obedience and with the support of the Church, toward the conversion of the pagans. From Rome, received by Gregory II, he departed with the name changed to that of the ancient Roman martyr B. (the change took place on 14 May) and equipped with a bull authorizing and recommending the work he was to undertake. From Thuringia, B. returned to the land that had already attracted his imagination and heart, Frisia. He found it in conditions much more receptive to his preaching, which he carried out in close accord with Willibrord, bishop of Utrecht and evangelizer of Frisia. In Hesse, where paganism was still unchallenged, he exercised his apostolate 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 Pope, who consecrated him bishop, it seems on 30 November of the same year, granting him the broadest instructions and commendatory letters. The first of these was for the powerful mayor of Christendom, Charles Martel. On this occasion B. pronounced the famous oath of fidelity to the Holy See, of which the text is still preserved (ed. Tangl, in MGH, Epistulae, XVI, pp. 28-29). Returning to Hesse, he resumed the struggle against idolatry; the felling of the oak of Donar Gemsar (near Fritzlar), with which he then built a small church to St. Peter, greatly contributed to the spread of the Gospel.
Adjacent to Hesse, and equally untouched by Roman civilization, Thuringia immediately drew the attention of the Saint. He spent ten years there, spreading among the populations the word of that God whose zeal St. Kilian and some other Irish or Frankish missionaries had not succeeded in making known. There he had to wage fierce battle against the ignorance of paganized priests, who from the beginning had perverted the work of evangelization entrusted to them. In 731 Gregory III conferred upon B. the dignity of archbishop, entrusting him with the task of establishing bishoprics in the parts of Germany most advanced in the faith. Between 734 and 735 the apostle extended his care as far as Bavaria, continuing 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, to receive instructions directly from the Pope. 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, convene and preside over synods, and revise the constitutions of monasteries, nostram agentem vicem, as the bull to the bishops of Bavaria and Germany expresses it (Gregory III, Epistle 44).
Then B. reorganized the dioceses of Salzburg, Regensburg, and Freising in Bavaria and created that of Passau (738-39). The local clergy had to be purged; then, perhaps in 740, the first synod could be convened. The following year, 741, B. went on to organize the churches of central Germany: one diocese for Hesse: namely, Buraburg (Bürberg); two for Thuringia: Würzburg and Erfurt. At the same time he established two more bishoprics to meet the growing needs of Bavaria: Neuburg and Eichstätt, near which stood the monastery of Heidenheim. In 744, B. provided for his greatest monastic foundation: the abbey of Fulda, from which would come the largest band of missionaries and which would become 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 as early as 742, following the death of Charles Martel and 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 frequent interventions of kings and nobles, the dissipation of ecclesiastical goods, and the scarcity of councils. Where the strict subjection to the dynasty prevented active action by the central power of the Church, the new Pope, the Greek Zachary, turned the now well-known fervent zeal of the archbishop of Germany. His designation had been requested from the Curia by the mayor of Austrasia, Carloman, who devoted himself entirely to the reform of the clergy and the convening of councils, drawing in his reluctant brother, Pippin the Short of Neustria. With B. present, solemn councils confirmed the subordination of the churches of Austrasia to the archbishop of Germany, the need to fill vacant bishoprics, the strict subjection of priests to bishops, the frequency of synods, the purging of the clergy, with regard to the restoration and respect of the hierarchy; while a series of measures provided for the restoration of lax discipline and aimed to ensure the return to the Church of goods wrongfully extorted. After deposing some guilty bishops—those of Mainz, Cewiliob of Neustria, Aldebert, and of Austrasia, Clement—overcoming difficulties and hostilities even within the clergy, B. completed his work by consecrating, at the behest of Pippin the Short, the archbishops of Reims, Rouen, and Sens.
Returning to Germany, B. had to decide on his metropolitan see: archbishop of Austrasia since 742, his see should have been Cologne, according to the explicit assignment of the Council of 745. But the opposition of certain Frankish bishops, while showing how the apostle had not succeeded in forming (perhaps because of the already entrenched spirit of nationality and the contrast that in the centuries to come would divide the two banks of the Rhine) a compact Franco-German ecclesiastical unity, led him to prefer Mainz, which had not yet been raised to an archiepiscopal see. But as archbishop ad personam, he represented more than ever the authority of the Holy See in the Germanic lands, as legate a latere of the Pope, equipped with the broadest powers.
The apostle was now nearing the end of his life. After having consecrated king, in 750, Pippin the Short—whose brother Carloman’s retirement from the world allowed the reunification of Austrasia and Neustria into a single kingdom—and having obtained from him the appointment of his faithful disciple Lull as his successor in Mainz in 752, B. returned to conclude his life with preaching in Frisia, where his exemplary activity had begun. He went there, an octogenarian, in the foreboding of his end, and having settled the dispute between the see of Utrecht and that of Cologne by immediately subjecting Utrecht to the Holy See, he turned with a few followers to bring the faith to the idolaters of East Frisia, and there, while baptizing and confirming the neophytes, he was massacred with his companions by a mob of pagans enraged by his practices, on 5 June 755. His remains were first taken to Utrecht, then to Mainz, and finally to Fulda, where they were buried according to the apostle’s wish.
Among the greatest figures of the period of the Church’s victorious expansion, ST. BONIFACE converted large numbers of people in Frisia, Hesse, and Thuringia; carried forward the evangelization of Bavaria and central Germany; and gave ecclesiastical organization to Germany. He reformed the Frankish Church. Energetic and effective in execution, he inspired around him both affection and zeal, which, together with the spirit of deference that he consistently displayed in his dealings with Rome, formed the essential foundations of the missionary method he established. A true apostle of the Romanitas of the Church and a master of missionary activity to which he devoted his entire life, he succeeded in advancing the work of evangelization.
St. Boniface – Altar of the saint’s tomb, in the cathedral of Fulda (18th century).
St. Boniface – The saint in the act of baptizing and his martyrdom. Miniature from the “Sacramentary of Udine” (11th century), preserved in the Capitular Library but originating from Fulda. Identical scenes are found in five other sacramentaries of Fulda provenance (centuries