Related articles and links |  1 of 4

"Irony" seems a concept invented for such a situation as this: The man historian Christopher Dawson once called the most influential Englishman who ever lived is the patron saint of … Germany.

And, as journalist Uwe Siemon-Netto has recently reminded us, the 60th anniversary of D-Day is also the 1250th anniversary of this man's death.

There is one more layer of seeming irony in this story of the man who evangelized Germany and set the stage for Western Christendom: he was a monk.

Before we get to the man himself, we should think about this fact. Every modern person knows that monks lived out their lives in cloistered irrelevancy, too busy with the inward pursuit of holiness to do much to change the course of history—right? Wrong, of course. Thomas Cahill has busted that myth with his paean to Irish monasticism, How the Irish Saved Civilization. But it lives on, perpetuated by Hollywood and Madison Ave.

In fact, in the centuries that followed the fall of Rome to the barbarian tribes, it was the monks who did most to convert the conquerors to the religion of the conquered. Monastics were used by Gregory the Great (540-604) and the Roman Christians. The most famous of these was the "apostle to England," Augustine of Canterbury, who missionized England in 597-604/5. And Celtic—that is, Irish—monks did much to bring the Christian faith to the European continent. The star here was Willibrord, who led a highly successful mission in the area of modern-day Belgium and Holland from 690 on.

Typically, a cluster of 10 or 12 pioneer monk-missionaries would come to a new—and thoroughly pagan—area, set up a church, bring people into the fellowship, teach, and train leaders. During their mission, they would plant crops, acquire herds, and live as normal citizens. But once the church was well established in that area, they would move on to the next place.

These were well-disciplined groups, rotated regularly, and closely bound to the other communities of their order and the mother house. They were supported, prayed for, financially benefited by their brotherhood back home.

They preached in the vernacular. And in environments of age-old, entrenched native religions, they made blunt, unflattering comparisons to Christianity of specific elements of Paganism. Willibrord, for instance, might preach: "It is not God that you worship but the Devil, who has deceived you O king into the vilest error. There is no God but the one God. …"

No one exemplified the courage and commitment of these "shock troops" of early Christian Europe better than St. Boniface, our English patron saint of Germany.

A colleague of Willibrord, Boniface lived from 680 to 754. Born with the name Wynfrith, in south Devon, he was given to God by his father when the latter recovered miraculously from a serious illness. At age five, Wynfrith entered a monastery at Exeter.

The boy soon showed himself both brilliant and spiritually mature. He rose quickly through the ranks and could have become abbot of an English monastery. But the missionary spirit burned within him, and he led a party of monks to Frisia (today a province in the north of Holland), where Willibrord had begun the work of evangelization. This, in John Fines's picturesque phrase, was "a dank land, dissected by waterways and haunted by mists."

This mission, however, was cut short. Radbod, the Frisian king, was brutally re-imposing paganism on this area. So Wynfrith went to Rome in 718, where Pope Gregory II gave him the name "Boniface" (one who utters good), and sent him on a mission to the North. An 8th-century life of Boniface tells the story:

next page... |  1 of 4

share this page

June (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48