Vigils Reading – St Boniface

A reading by Christopher Dawson on

ST BONIFACE

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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.