St. Boniface

St. Boniface was born around 675 in Wessex, England, and given the name Winfrid; tradition associates his birthplace with Crediton in Devon. Educated from childhood in Benedictine monasteries, he became a monk, a respected teacher of grammar and Scripture, and a priest, with every prospect of quiet distinction at home. But around the age of forty he left England to preach the Gospel to the pagan peoples of the continent, beginning with a first, unsuccessful mission to Frisia in 716. Undeterred, Winfrid traveled to Rome in 718, where Pope Gregory II commissioned him for the mission to the Germanic lands and gave him the name Boniface. He evangelized Hesse and Thuringia with growing success, and tradition records his most famous act: the felling of the Oak of Thor at Geismar, a sacred tree of the pagan cult. When the god sent no punishment, many accepted baptism, and Boniface used the timber, the story relates, to build a chapel dedicated to St. Peter. Consecrated a missionary bishop in 722 and later archbishop, Boniface spent three decades organizing the Church in Germany: founding and restoring dioceses, holding reforming synods, correcting abuses among the Frankish clergy, and planting monasteries that became centers of faith and learning, above all the great abbey of Fulda, founded in 744 by his disciple St. Sturm. He drew English monks and nuns, including St. Lioba, into the work, and as archbishop of Mainz he anchored the German church firmly in communion with Rome. In old age Boniface resigned his see and returned to the unfinished mission of Frisia. On June 5, 754, at Dokkum in the present-day Netherlands, he and more than fifty companions were set upon by an armed band as they awaited candidates for confirmation, and he was martyred; tradition tells that he shielded himself with a book of the Gospels, and a sword-slashed codex associated with the event is still preserved at Fulda. Venerated as a martyr from the moment of his death, long before formal canonization processes, he was buried at Fulda, where his tomb in the cathedral remains a national shrine and the German bishops still gather. The "Apostle of Germany" is honored on June 5 as patron of Germany and of brewers.