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Cultural conflicts in the missions of saint Boniface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
A passing comment from a visitor from Fulda to the thirteen hundredth anniversary celebrations for the birth of Boniface at Crediton on 5 June 1980 aptly sums up the purpose of this paper. He observed that without the work of Boniface there could have been no Bismarck. Thus in a sense the Wessex missionary who was so much more a papal legate than an evengelist laid the foundation for the third as well as the second Reich when he consecrated Pepin III king of the Franks in 751. Whether like John Foxe ‘we find of him in stories, that he was a great setter-up and upholder of such blind superstition, and of all popery’ or like his latest biographer we consider that ‘a devotion and a perseverence equal to that which he so nobly exhibited will be needed if our fragmented Church is to become that one true family which the Saviour himself desired it to be’, there is no doubt that he worked for a supranational rather than an intertribal ideal. He has as much claim as Benedict to be the patron saint of a united Europe since it was his work which inspired the imperial decrees of 743, 754 and 757 which made the Rule obligatory. Christopher Dawson’s judgement that he was ‘the greatest Englishman’ is based more on his subtle blending of Frankish with papal influence over the Saxons and his diplomatic regularisation of the Frankish church. As a missionary he is one of a noble line of Celts, Angles and Saxons who converted the heathen. This tradition inspired his original visit to Radbod of Frisia in 716 and his work with Willibrord 719-21.
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1982
References
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11 Letter 10, Emerton pp 25-31.
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