Vigils Reading – St Boniface

ST BONIFACE

The Apostle of Germany4

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In art and religion, in scholarship and literature, the Anglo-Saxons of the

eighth century were the leaders of their age. At the time when continental

civilization was at its lowest ebb, the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons marked

the turn of the tide. The Saxon pilgrims flocked to Rome as the center of the

Christian world and the Papacy found its most devoted allies and servants in

the Anglo-Saxon monks and missionaries. The foundations of the new age were

laid by the greatest of them all, St Boniface of Crediton, “the apostle of

Germany”, a man who had a deeper influence on the history of Europe than any

Englishman who has ever lived.

Unlike his Celtic predecessors, he was not an individual missionary, but

a statesman and organizer, who was, above all, servant of the Roman order. To

him is due the foundation of the medieval German Church and the final

conversion of Hesse and Thuringia, the heart of the German land. With the help

of his Anglo-Saxon monks and nuns he destroyed the last strongholds of

Germanic heathenism and planted abbeys and bishoprics on the site of the old

Folkburgs and heathen sanctuaries, such as Buraburg, Amoneburg, and Fulda.

On his return from Rome in 739 he used his authority as Papal Vicar in Germany

to reorganize the Bavarian Church and to establish the new dioceses which had

so great an importance in German history.

For Germany beyond the Rhine was still a land without cities, and the

foundation of the new bishoprics meant the creation of new centers of cultural

life. It was through the work of St Boniface that Germany first became a living

member of the European society. But in addition to this, Boniface was the

reformer of the whole Frankish church. The decadent Merovingian dynasty

had already given up the substance of its power to the mayors of the palace, but

in spite of their military prowess, which saved France from conquest by the

Arabs in 735, they had done nothing for culture and had only furthered the

degradation of the Frankish Church. Charles Martel had used the abbeys and

bishoprics to reward his lay partisans, and had carried out a wholesale

secularization of Church property. As Boniface wrote to the Pope, “Religion is

trodden under foot. Benefices are given to greedy laymen or unchaste and

publican clerics. All their crimes do not prevent their attaining the priesthood;

at last rising in rank as they increase in sin they become bishops, and those of

them who can boast that they are not adulterers or fornicators, are drunkards,

given up to the chase, and soldiers who do not shrink from shedding Christian

blood.”

Nevertheless, the successors of Charles Martel, Pepin and Carloman,

were favorable to Boniface’s reforms. Armed with his special powers as Legate

of the Holy See and personal representative of the Pope, he undertook the

desecularization of the Frankish Church.

4 Dawson, Christopher. “The Making of Europe”, New York, 1956, pp 185-186.9