Feast day: June 5
St. Boniface
English monk who evangelized the Germanic tribes, famously felling the sacred Oak of Thor — and was martyred at 79 while still on mission.
He was born Winfrid about 675 in the kingdom of Wessex in England, became a Benedictine monk, and might have lived out a quiet and honored life as a scholar and teacher. But he burned to carry the Gospel to the pagan Germanic peoples of the Continent, the kin of his own forefathers, and so he left his monastery, went to Rome to receive the pope's blessing and a new name — Boniface — and set out for the forests of Germany.
His mission was vast and dangerous, among tribes still given to the worship of the old gods. In the most famous incident of his life, to break the people's fear of their idols, he took an axe to the great Oak of Thor at Geismar, a tree sacred to the thunder-god — and when no thunderbolt struck him down, many of the watching heathen were converted, and from its wood he built a chapel.
He was far more than a destroyer of idols. As the organizer of the Church in Germany he founded dioceses and monasteries, including the great abbey of Fulda, reformed the clergy of the Frankish kingdom, and worked in close union with the popes whose legate he was — earning the title 'Apostle of Germany' and the honor of being called the father of Christian Germany.
In his old age, when he might have rested, he returned to the dangerous mission fields of Frisia where he had begun. There, in 754, a band of armed pagans fell upon him and his companions; forbidding his followers to resist, he was struck down, raising — the tradition says — a book of the Gospels to shield his head. That blood-stained book is still preserved at Fulda, where he is buried, a missionary and a martyr.
When the oak fell and no god struck him down, the watching tribes converted. He built a chapel from its wood.
“Let us be neither dogs that do not bark nor silent onlookers, but faithful watchmen.”
— St. Boniface
Image: Cornelis Bloemaert (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/02656a.htm
Get a story like this every Sunday.