| #### 2. THE WORK OF ST. BONIFACE |

| #### #### While, on the Eastern frontiers of Christendom, the emperors were enforcing policies that threatened to weaken still further this remnant of the old world and to lose to the Church its last cultured people, a new movement of consolidation was, in the West, laying the foundation on which all the external activity of the Church for the next five hundred years was to be built. This was the alliance between the Papacy and the kingdom of the Franks. The agents of the work were the two Mayors of the Palace, Charles Martel and his son Pepin the Short, the Popes Zachary and Stephen II, the Lombard kings, Liutprand and Aistulf and the English missionary bishop St. Boniface. #### Pepin of Heristal, in whom this family emerges as the real ruler of the Franks, died in 714. Charles Martel was one of his natural children -- then twenty-six years of age -- and, lest he should usurp the heritage, locked away in a fortress by his father's widow. He escaped, however, and, in the customary manner, made away with the heirs, his half-brothers, and seized the position his father had left. He showed himself, from the first, to be a mighty warrior, the greatest soldier Gaul had known since the last of the Roman generals. The Frisians, the Saxons, the Bavarians, the Alemanni -- all these hostile nations of the eastern frontier, felt his hand in turn. Aquitaine, Burgundy and the western Frankish kingdom too, he so thoroughly subdued that by the time of his death (741) all Gaul was once again, after three centuries, really united under one ruler. #### Another enemy against whom his wars never ceased was Islam. In 732 the Mohammedan armies had penetrated as far as Poitiers. Here Charles met them, and in one of the really decisive battles of world history, he defeated them with tremendous slaughter. In 735 there was a new campaign, the Saracens having seized Arles and Avignon and penetrated even into Burgundy; and in 737 a further campaign in which, again with great slaughter of the defeated, Nimes and other strongholds in the south were restored to Christianity. By the end of his reign, Charles Martel had established himself as the natural political chief of Western Christendom. Against the Arabs he had repeated in the West the success of Leo III in the East; in his own realm he had established a political leadership it had not known for centuries; and, unlike his great Eastern contemporary, he had not been so unfortunate as to involve himself in a quarrel with the Church. So far indeed was he from enmity that he has a place as one of the chief promoters of its missionary activities. "Were it not for the King of the Franks," said St. Boniface, "I could not rule the faithful, nor defend my priests and clerics, the monks and the servants of God. Nor would I be able, without the fear his commands inspire, to hinder the paganism and idolatry of Germany." #### The King of the Franks was the mission's protector, but the missionary was the Englishman Boniface, and in him the apostolic Benedictine monachism, to which his own country owed so much, now returned to the continent, in the service of the Roman Church that had first sent it to England, to be now that Church's instrument for the conversion of Germany. St. Boniface -- Winfrid was his name until the pope changed it -- was born in Devonshire about the year 680. He was of noble birth and he had to fight with his family before he was allowed his heart's desire to become a monk at Exeter. From Exeter he went to Nursling, in Hampshire, and here he came, indirectly, under the influence of St. Aldhelm, Abbot of Malmesbury, and Bishop of Sherborne, a gifted, artistic spirit, poet and musician, whose school was, for the west, something of what Jarrow and the school of York were for the north. In all this culture St. Boniface was well versed. He became rector of the abbey school and the author of a Latin grammar. He was a scholar; as the time went, a savant; and he was an ascetic too. In 710 he was ordained priest, and then he began a second siege of authority to consent to his desires -- this time to go as a missionary into Germany. Not until 716 did his abbot yield, and in that year Boniface crossed over to Frisia. #### Here a one-time monk of Iona had for many years been labouring. This was Willibrord, the founder of the see of Utrecht, to which, in 695, Pope Sergius I had consecrated him, and of the famous abbey of Echternach in what to-day is Luxembourg. Boniface's first essay was not successful and he returned to Nursling. The abbot died, and Boniface had the utmost difficulty in avoiding election as his successor. His heart was still in Germany, and in 718 he set out for Rome. From Rome he returned to Frisia, officially commissioned this time, and for three years he worked with St. Willibrord. #### In 722 the pope -- Gregory II -- recalled him, consecrated him bishop and once more despatched him to Germany, to work this time as the chief of an independent mission. One feature of this consecration has a great significance, for it reveals that desire of immediate control over its subordinates which characterised the policy of the Roman See since the peace of Constantine first set it free to organise its powers. The newly-consecrated bishop swore obedience to the pope in the same terms that the suffragan bishops of the Roman province had used from time immemorial. The consecration was a sign, also, that the new churches of Germany were to be the pope's own personal concern. The pope also gave Boniface letters for Charles Martel, and the Frankish king gave the missionary the sealed letter of safety which was to be, for thirty years, the human means of his protection. #### For the next twenty years Boniface moved through Hesse and Thuringia preaching the simplicities of the Gospel, destroying the pagan sanctuaries and everywhere founding monasteries, for women no less than for men. Amoeneburg, Ohrdruff, Fritzlar, Bischoffsheim, Kitzingen, Ochsenfurt, all date from this time. He remained in constant communication with Rome, which the death of his patron Gregory II did not interrupt. The new pope, Gregory III, recalled him in 742 to give him the pallium, and declare him Archbishop, and to commission him to found other sees. In all there were eight of these -- Salzburg, Frisingen, Ratisbon, Passau, Buraburg, Erfurt, Wurzburg, and Eichstadt. Two years after his return from Rome he founded the most celebrated of all German abbeys at Fulda. In 753 it was made directly subject to the Roman See -- a rare distinction at that time -- and ten years later its monks numbered 400. There St. Boniface's body still rests, brought by the pious hands of his disciples after the martyrdom which came to him, in 755, in that Frisia where his missionary career had opened. #### St. Boniface is the apostle of Germany, as St. Patrick is of Ireland, and through the co-operation of Frankish king and pope in support of his mission he is, in a way, a co-founder of the alliance between these two powers of western Europe. But his relations with the Frankish king, and with that alliance, were still more intimate. St. Boniface has a double career. He is a reformer in Gaul as truly as he is a founder in Germany. #### The religious revival of which the Irish foundation at Luxeuil was the centre had never received any steady support from the Frankish kings. Wherever the monks of St. Columbanus settled, works of piety flourished, morals and Christian life revived, the heathens were converted. But over the great mass of the territory ruled by the Franks the old disorders still went on unchecked, clerical illiteracy and immorality, simony, the brutality of the lay nobles degrading the sees and the monasteries they forcibly appropriated. Despite all the labours of a century of saints, Frankish Catholicism was in as bad a plight at the end of the seventh century as it had been at the beginning. #### The accession of Charles Martel made matters worse. The ceaseless effort of defence against Mohammedans in the south and Saxons in the east which filled the twenty-seven years of his reign, entailed a kind of universal conscription in the national life. To the needs of the sovereign everything was ruthlessly subordinated, the Church no less than the rest. Its property, its prestige, its jurisdiction and revenues were chiefly valuable to him as a treasury from which to reward the faithful vassal and to secure the allegiance of the waverer. Men little better than brigands, ancestors of the robber-baron villains of the nursery tale, began to fill the sees. Some could not even read. The luckier among them held several sees at once. Other great sees were left for years without a bishop. How the spiritual life of the Church fared under such prelates, drunkards, murderers, debauchees, can be imagined. Recalling it in years to come, and recalling the man who was so largely responsible, St. Boniface could assure Pepin, Charles Martel’s son, that his father was certainly in hell, and Pepin could believe it. Against thirty years of such a regime, crowning as it did a century of steady decline, nothing but occasional, isolated, individual piety was left to survive. #### St. Boniface's career in Gaul really begins with the death of the terrible Charles Martel (741). The two sons who succeeded, Pepin the Short and Carloman, had received a monastic education at St. Denis, and it was in the kingdom of Carloman, soon to become a monk himself, that St. Boniface began his new career. As in his pioneer work in Germany, so now as reformer in Gaul, he acted as agent of the Roman Church. Councils were held, the first for nearly a century, in the eastern kingdom in 741 and 744, in Pepin's kingdom at Soissons, also in 744; and, in 745, a general council met of the whole of the Frankish Church. Vacant sees were filled, new sees founded, the grouping of the sees round a metropolitan see restored. Councils were henceforth to meet annually, the metropolitan was to make the visitation of the bishops, the bishops of their clergy. The itinerant clergy were to be suppressed. The laws forbidding the clergy to marry, to carry arms, to hunt, and providing that they should wear the special clerical dress, were renewed. For delinquents appropriate sanctions were provided -- spiritual penalties and others too, imprisonment and floggings. In the monasteries the rule of St. Benedict was henceforth of obligation. Other canons dealt with the superstitious rites and survivals of paganism with which the popular Catholicism was interwoven. Sacrifices to trees and streams, the custom of honouring the pagan holy days, magical practices, witchcraft -- all these still flourished in places, and these councils provided for their extirpation. #### A much less usual matter was the appearance of heretics. One of them, Adalbert, a Frank, gave himself out as a new prophet, to whom angels had brought relics of an invincible efficacy. He had new prayers, filled with mysterious names; forgave sins without confession; gave away his own hair and nails as relics; and in the course of years had gathered an immense following, and had even found two fools of bishops to consecrate him. The other heretic Clement, was an Irishman. His teaching was of a more intellectual kind -- a curious eclectic rearrangement of orthodoxy and heresy. #### The reform council so earnestly desired by St. Gregory had at last been realised -- a hundred and forty years after his death. But the old obstacle to any real reform still survived. Pepin was no less attached to the royal hold on the Church than the Merovingians whom he had displaced. He was willing enough to see the disorders of clerical life corrected, and laws made to improve the quality of Frankish Christianity, but to the canons which, restoring the hierarchy, provided the only safeguard for the future, he turned a deaf ear. So long as he reigned none of the proposed metropolitan organisation passed into practice. Not even St. Boniface himself found recognition as archbishop of a particular see, for all his reception of the pallium from Pope Zachary and his extensive authority as papal legate. For all his sanctity, and the merit of his mighty labours, he was never, for these princes, anything more than the bishop of the frontier never, apparently, a force in their councils, never a political power never personally intimate with any of them. This situation had its advantages, the greatest of which was the possibility of preaching Catholicism to the Saxons as a thing not necessarily associated with their detested Frankish conquerors. The main strength of the English saint lay not in Frankish sovereigns, for all the value of the protection they afforded him, but in his constant, uninterrupted relations with the popes. At every turn he lays before them his plans and his difficulties, and it is the popes who encourage and console him. These three popes -- Gregory II, Gregory III, and Zachary -- are very truly the sources of the new German church's vitality, as they are, also, of what new life came through Boniface to the Church in Gaul. Zachary died in 752 and the saint survived him a bare three years. Before the martyrdom came which crowned his long life of self-sacrificing exile, political affairs in the Frankish kingdom had taken a new turn. The new pope, Stephen II (752-757), had inaugurated, between the Roman See and the one Catholic power in the West, that alliance which was to be the pivot of papal history for the next five hundred years, and which was to do much, in the immediate future, to change the type of character elected as Bishop of Rome. In that revolution St. Boniface had little more than a place of honour. He was the greatest bishop of the Frankish empire, and the one in closest touch with Rome; but it was others whom Pepin chose as his agents when, in 751, he besought the papal sanction for the coup d’etat he meditated. ####  |