Remembering the Courage - 1250 years after the death of Saint Bonifatius

By Stefan Kirchner

5 June 2004, is the 1250th anniversary of the death of Saint Bonifatius (Saint Boni-face), who brought our faith to what is today Germany and the Northern Netherlands. He died as a martyr when he was killed in the Frisian town of Dokkum (now located in the Netherlands) attempting to bring the word of God to this remote area.

Saint Bonifatius was born as Winfried in Crediton (Credyton / Crediodunum) in England be-tween 672 and 675 A.D. At that time Germanic tribes had replaced the Roman rule for almost three centuries and created six kingdoms, among them Wessex, in which Crediton is located. Monks from Scotland and Ireland go to England as missionaries in the first half of the 7th century. Christianity has reached Crediton only three decades before Winfried is born. As a boy he most likely heard of King Ketwin who laid down his crown in 685 in order to become a monk and although his father was initially opposed to the idea of loosing his heir to the religious orders, he allowed Winfried to join the monastery in Exeter.

At age 30 he became a priest, ten years later he started his first missionary trip to Friesland, where he was to be killed four decades later. When is missionary bid failed, he returned to England where he was elected abbot of his monastery in Nutshalling. Yet he soon left again, this time for Rome where Pope Gregor II who renamed him Bonifatius and ordered him to continue his mission-ary work north of the alps. Bonifatius went to Thuringia and later to what today make up the Netherlands where he got to know Bishop Willibrord, the great missionary of the Dutch peo-ple. Willibrord had planned to make Bonifatius his successor as bishop of Utrecht, which to this day is the heart of Catholicism in the Netherlands. It is unclear to this day, why Bonifatius refused the offer, but he learned from Willibrord and with the support of both Rome and the worldly authorities he began his work as a missionary in Germany.

In 721 Bonifatius went to the area which is now the German Federal state of Hessen, in size and population today comparable to Israel. Back then the area was part of the Franconian realm but the local church, although older than the church in England, was unable to spread more widely, not least due to the ongoing threat of repeated Saxon incursions in the area. The local population therefore still adhered to the old faith, although often local rulers had "officially" become Christians.

Among those rulers were the brothers Dettic and Deorulf who ruled from a castle on a hill overlooking a wide area, the Amöneburg, which to this very day stands out from the sur-rounding plain area nearby the University town of Marburg. It was here on the Amöneburg that Bonifatius founded his first monastery on German soil in an attempt to establish a starting point for Christianity in the region. It's location on top of a mountain, a castle that can be seen from afar, may have reminded Bonifatius of Zion and like the city on the mountain his first monastery should become a beacon of Christianity from which the light of Christ spread through large parts of mainland Europe. It certainly helped that the structure of Benedictine monasteries - with an elected abbott chosen among all members of the monastery - looked familiar to the local population which traditionally elected their kings from all free men.

In Fall 722 Bonifatius followed the call by Pope Gregor II to return to Rome where he became Bishop on 30 November 722. On his way back he met the de facto ruler of the franconian people Karl Martell, who was pleased by the fact that the Pope had send the new bishop di-rectly to him and not to his superior, the Merovingian King - at least pleased enough to give Bonifatius the vital support needed in order to continue his missionary work.

The local population believed that their Gods were present at special holy places, among them an oaktree which was devoted to the Germanic God of Thunder, Donar. In 723 Bonifatius went to this very place, called Geismar, north of Amöneburg, where he had founded the first monastery. It was believed by the locals that whoever would lay hand on this tree would be killed by Donar instantly. Yet Bonifatius felled the tree and instead of being killed by light-ning he used the wood to start the construction of a church. Afterwards he founded a monastery in Fritzlar, a town the name of which originally meant place of peace. Later Bonifatius looked to the East, to Thuringia where Kilian, Kolonat and Totnan had died as martyrs in 689 and where rumors abounded that some christian priests also gave offerings to Donar.

In 732 Bonifatius became Archbishop and took the opportunity to found more monasteries. Here Lioba, one of his relatives, helped him by leading a women's monas-tery in Tauberbischofsheim. She is buried next to him in the cathedral in Fulda. After having been in Rome again, Bonifatius devoted his energies to Bavaria before he returned to Hessen and Thuringia in 741 where he established three new dioceses, Würzburg, Büraburg and Erfurt. In the same year Karl Martell died, yet his sons Karlmann and Pippin who had been edu-cated in the Saint Denis monastery were more open minded with regard to Bonifatius's ideas than their father who had more or less tolerated the missionary work of the apostle of the Germans'. This enabled the foundation of the monastery in Fulda on 12 March 744.

Seven years later Bonifatius asked Pope Zacharias for the privilege of exemption, i.e. to ensure that the monastery in Fulda is only subject to the Holy See, and asked that he be buried in Fulda. In 747 Bonifatius became Bishop of Mainz and Karlmann joined the monastery in Monte Cassino and his brother Pippin was crowned king. This enabled Bonifatius to ensure that his followers, especially those who had come from across the Channel to support him in Ger-many, were taken care of and that they were protected by King Pippin after his death. He was about eighty years old when he returned to Friesland in the northern Netherlands.

In Spring 754 he settled nearby Dokkum where he baptized a large number of Friesians. Many of them were supposed to be confirmed on 5 June 754, but instead he and his 50-something compan-ions were murdered. A few days later franconian soldiers were able to recover the bodies of the martyrs and the books spread all over the place.

Today the city of Dokkum remembers this event with a large memorial called The Field of Martyrs where a total of sixteen books made of bronze (seven, five and four in different sizes) remind visitors of the year 754 and a plant grows on the ground which is green in spring and turns red like blood in fall. To this very day many pictures of Saint Bonifatius show him holding up a Bible which is being pierced by a sword, fatally wounding the missionary.

The Holy Father John Paul II on 18 November 1980, when visiting Fulda where Saint Bonifatius is laid to rest in the local cathedral, said in front of the Cathedral that with Bonifatius the history of Christianity began in Germany. And although many believe that this history has come to an end, the Holy Father called upon all that this history is to begin anew through the witness beared by those honoring Saint Bonifatius. His courage and his influence on Germany and the Netherlands is still remembered today, 1250 years after his death.

Contact

, DE
Stefan Kirchner - Freelance Writer, 0049 1704894532

Email

stefankirchner@catholic.org

Keywords

Bonifatius

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