Commontide
Liturgical Color: Red
Proper 4 (May 29-June 4)
O God, the protector of all those who trust in you, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: Increase and multiply upon us your mercy, that, with you as our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal that we lose not the things eternal; grant this, heavenly Father, for the sake of your Son Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Most liturgical texts are from the Book of Common Prayer (2019) of the Anglican Church in North America.
The New Coverdale Psalter, © 2019 by the Anglican Church in North America. Used by permission.
Archbishop of Mainz, Apostle to the Germans, and Martyr
Ecumenical Commemoration
Boniface (born Wynfrith in Wessex, c. 675; died 754) was an English Benedictine monk who became the great missionary to the Germanic peoples east of the Rhine and Archbishop of Mainz. The church remembers him as the Apostle to the Germans, the feller of the pagan oak at Geismar, and a martyr who fell at Dokkum forbidding his companions to fight. He wrote of the church as a ship that *must not be abandoned, but steered.*
Wynfrith (later Boniface) was born around 675 in the kingdom of Wessex, probably near Exeter. He entered the monastery of Nursling in Hampshire as a boy and became an accomplished scholar and teacher. Around 716, he made his first missionary journey to Frisia, which failed due to political instability.
In 718 he traveled to Rome, where Pope Gregory II gave him the name Boniface and commissioned him for the German mission. He worked first in Thuringia and Hesse, where his most famous act took place: at Geismar, he felled the great Oak of Thor (Donar's Oak), a sacred tree venerated by the local pagans. When no divine retribution followed, the watching crowd accepted baptism. Boniface used the timber to build a chapel dedicated to St. Peter.
Gregorys II and III and their successors supported Boniface with papal authority, and the Frankish rulers provided political backing. Over three decades, Boniface established bishoprics at Salzburg, Regensburg, Freising, Passau, Erfurt, Büraburg, Würzburg, and Eichstätt. He founded the great monastery of Fulda (744), which became the center of his mission and his eventual burial place. He reformed the Frankish church through a series of councils, imposed canonical discipline on corrupt or irregular clergy, and established close ties between the Frankish church and Rome.
In 747 he was appointed Archbishop of Mainz. But in old age, he returned to the Frisian mission where he had started decades earlier. On June 5, 754, while preparing to confirm a group of new converts near Dokkum, his party was attacked by pagan Frisians. Boniface forbade his companions to resist and was killed. His blood-stained copy of Ambrose's De Bono Mortis ('On the Advantage of Death') was preserved at Fulda as a relic.
The felling of the Oak of Thor at Geismar is Boniface's defining act and is recorded by Willibald in the earliest Life. The narrative follows the classic missionary confrontation topos: the saint challenges the pagan deity by destroying its sacred object; the deity fails to respond; the watching crowd converts. The pattern is ancient (cf. Elijah on Carmel, Martin of Tours destroying pagan shrines). Whether the event happened essentially as described is debated — the pattern is so conventional that skepticism is warranted — but the specific location (Geismar in Hesse) and the detail of using the timber for a chapel suggest historical memory underlying the stylized account.
Boniface's martyrdom at Dokkum is well attested: Willibald provides a detailed account, and the recovery of the blood-stained manuscript is independently documented by the Fulda tradition. The prohibition on resistance echoes Christ's command at Gethsemane, but Boniface's letters show a man genuinely concerned about martyrdom, making the historical core plausible.