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Epistolœ
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General SummaryWYNFRITH, afterwards known as St. Boniface, was born about 680 in Devonshire, England. While still a young man, he became a Benedictine monk and taught grammar and theology in the monastery schools. A distinguished career in the English Church was opening to him, when the call came to leave friends and fatherland for the perilous work of a foreign missionary. St. Boniface visited Rome and received from Pope Gregory II a commission to evangelize Germany east of the Rhine. Supported by the pope and under the protection of the Frankish ruler, Charles Martel, St. Boniface began his self-appointed task. In Frisia, Hesse, Thuringia, and Bavaria he led a systematic crusade, baptizing the heathen, overturning idols, and founding monasteries. Many helpers, both monks and nuns, came to him from England to transplant in the German wilderness English piety and culture. St. Boniface has been called the proconsul of the Papacy. First as bishop, then as archbishop, he was able to organize in Germany a strong Church, which looked to Rome for direction and control. It was from this Church of Germany that the remaining Teutonic peoples, including the Saxons, Danes, and Northmen, and the Slavic peoples beyond the Elbe, received Roman Christianity.
Historical Summaryn/a St. Boniface n/a’s interview with the pope proved to be completely successful, as we learn from a letter to him written by his good friend Bugga.
146. A Letter from the Abbess Bugga3
Be it known to thee, my gracious friend, that I give thanks to Almighty God without ceasing, because, as I learned from flay letter, He has poured upon thee His manifold mercies
and jealously guarded thee on thy way through unknown countries. First he inclined the pontiff,1 who holds the chair of Peter, to smile on thy heart’s wish. Afterwards he laid low before thee, Rathbod,2 that enemy of the Catholic Church; and then he revealed to thee in a dream that thou wert to reap the harvest of God and to gather the sheaves of holy souls into the granary of the heavenly kingdom. Wherefore, I acknowledge the more freely that no temporal vicissitudes can move my mind from its steady guardianship of thy love. But the flames of that love burn the stronger in me, since I know that, through the merits of thy prayers, I have come to a harbor of some quiet. And so again I humbly beg thee, deign to offer thy intercession before God for my poor self, that His grace may keep me safe under thy protection.
I would also have thee know that the book, The Sufferings of the Martyrs, which thou didst ask to have sent thee, I have not yet been able to obtain, but I shall send it when I can. And do thou, my beloved, send to console me what thou hast promised in thy kindest of letters, some selections from the Holy Scriptures.
I beg, too, that thou wilt offer holy masses for my relative . . . who was dear to me beyond all others. With this messenger I send thee now fifty shillings and an altar pall, because I could not get larger gifts. But these, though small, are sent with my fondest love.
3 Boniface, , No. 4.
1 Pope Gregory II.
2 A heathen king of the Frisians, among whom St. Boniface had labored for a short time before undertaking the mission to Germany. It is said that Rathbod, having agreed to be baptized, had already set his foot in the water, when he stopped to ask whether his forefathers were in heaven or hell. On being told their fate, he cried, "I prefer to be with my ancestors in hell than with a few beggars in heaven," and rejected the sacrament.
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Chicago: "A Letter from the Abbess Bugga," Epistolœ in Readings in Early European History, ed. Webster, Hutton (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1926), 310. Original Sources, accessed April 16, 2024, http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=IRR2Z5MYDX5JX47.
MLA: . "A Letter from the Abbess Bugga." Epistolœ, in Readings in Early European History, edited by Webster, Hutton, Boston, Ginn and Company, 1926, page 310. Original Sources. 16 Apr. 2024. http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=IRR2Z5MYDX5JX47.
Harvard: , 'A Letter from the Abbess Bugga' in Epistolœ. cited in 1926, Readings in Early European History, ed. , Ginn and Company, Boston, pp.310. Original Sources, retrieved 16 April 2024, from http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=IRR2Z5MYDX5JX47.
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