Two English Apostles
by Mike Oettle
TWO dates in
June are given to African martyrs – 3 June to the Martyrs of Uganda (1886),
and 18 June to Bernard Mizeki, of Mashonaland (1896). But while these men and
women who died for their faith lie close to home, there is another name on the
calendar (and a second not named in the Anglican calendar) on which I want to
throw some light.
Bernard and some of the Ugandan martyrs were converts of that great 19th-century wave of British missionary activity which is so familiar to us. Less well known to us today is the band of missionaries who emerged from the British Isles at the end of the Dark Ages and carried the gospel first from Celtic Britain to pagan England and then on from England to the Netherlands and Germany.
The one whose name is on the calendar is Boniface (5 June), but I’ll start with the one who came before him, namely Willibrord[1] (born about 658 AD – his saint’s day is 7 November).
(Both Willibrord and Boniface owed much to
the earlier missionary work of the Celtic saints, of whom Columba of Iona was
one. Columba’s day is 9 June.)
Willibrord came of a religious family, being the son of a hermit, St Wilgis, and as a youth was sent to live in the monastery at Ripon, Yorkshire, under Abbot St Wilfrid of York. In 677 Wilfrid was deposed and exiled and Willibrord, too, went into exile, becoming a disciple of St Egbert in Ireland.
In 688 he was ordained priest and in 690 Egbert sent him and 11 companions to convert the pagan Frisians, recently conquered by the Carolingian ruler Pepin the Young. Willibrord obtained a papal commission for this work and in 695 again went to Rome to be consecrated Archbishop of the Frisians (based at Utrecht), and on this occasion the pope, St Sergius, named him Clementius (although this name did not stick). In 698 Willibrord established the monastery of Echternach, now in Luxemburg, and began an outreach to Denmark and to the Frisian islands of Heligoland[2] (an important pagan centre) and Walcheren. [3] A pagan revolt undid much of his work, but this was begun again in 719.
In this year Willibrord was joined by a Benedictine priest, a nobleman from Wessex
called Wynfrid or Wynfrith (born in Devon about 675 and educated under St
Aldhelm), who had already attempted to begin mission work among the Frisians
and had, the previous year, been commissioned by Pope Gregory II to carry the
gospel to the pagan Germans east of the Rhine. Gregory also changed his name to
Bonifatius, or Boniface – and this name stuck.
In 722 Boniface branched out and established, in what is today Hessen, the first of many Benedictine monasteries. His success as a missionary resulted in a call to Rome, where Gregory consecrated him a missionary bishop and also gave him letters of recommendation to leading figures including Charles Martel, master of the Frankish kingdom.
Pagan awe of Martel’s name probably helped Boniface in the dramatic destruction of the sacred oak of the god Thor at Geismar, near the present-day university town of Göttingen, in Niedersachsen. Like Elijah challenging Baal, Boniface called on Thor to strike him down if he were indeed a god, but Thor, naturally, failed to intervene, and the wind pushed it down, causing it to fall in four sections. Boniface used the wood of the oak to build a church dedicated to St Peter, which was soon filled by those who had seen the tree fall.
Boniface spent the years 725 to 735 in Thuringia,[4] where he converted pagans and consolidated the haphazard work of earlier Irish missionaries. He was also joined by many English Benedictines, men and women, who helped him found four more monasteries. In 735 Pope Gregory III sent Boniface to Bavaria, where he created three (later four) bishoprics as well as another three in central Germany. Boniface’s authority over these bishops was confirmed when he was made Archbishop of Mainz and Primate of Germany in 751.
At the age of 75 Boniface retired and went on a last mission to Friesland. He met his end at Pentecost (5 June), 754, when a band of pagan Frisians killed him as he was reading the Scriptures to a group of converts. He was buried at his request at the famous monastery of Fulda, which he had founded.
Willibrord, remembered as the Apostle to the Frisians and patron saint of the Netherlands, and Boniface, Apostle to the Germans, together established a strong English cultural influence in the realms of the Carolingians and their successors, the German kings – the future Holy Roman Empire – and consolidated missionary efforts there by establishing the authority of Rome. It could be said that they had laid the foundations for the Empire’s holiness.
