ENGLISH APOSTLE TO THE GERMANS

News Analysis

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

UPI Religious Affairs Editor

HAMBURG, Germany, June 6 (UPI) -- It is a curious coincidence that as the Germany's former enemies observed the 60th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy Sunday, German churches gave homage to the Englishman who brought Christianity to their country and in a sense made Europe a Christian continent.

Exactly 1,250 years ago, the Benedictine friar Winfrith from Essex, better known as St. Boniface, was slain by robbers near the West Frisian town of Dokkum in the Netherlands, just as he was about to confirm newly baptized tribesmen. He was 80 years old at that time.

One and a quarter millennia -- this anniversary seemed important enough for the entire German Catholic Bishops' Conference last weekend to assemble at the saint's tomb in Fulda, where the English Benedictine monk was also honored with a musical. For as the newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine, phrased it, "He was for perhaps more important in Germany's history than (Prussia's king) Frederick the Great and Bismarck combined."

Boniface's biography, the paper continued, seems to fit perfectly into the European realities of the beginning third millennium: Here was an Englishman sent by Rome and the Frankish "mayor" (in reality, ruler) to evangelize the Germans, and finally murdered in the Netherlands.

While the Allies remembered in Normandy a blood sacrifice that led to the liberation of Europe from barbarity and the re-civilization of Germany, Germans reflected on a pan-European whose only weapons were his faith and books and pens -- and an ax with which he cut down the Saxons' greatest object of veneration in 723 A.D.

And that object was the mighty "Donareiche" in Geismar, the oak tree of their god, Thor. By felling it, Boniface demonstrated to the pagans the powerlessness of their old deities. With that he effectively broke their loyalty to them -- a historical feat the Nazis tried to reverse 1,210 years later by returning to the Germanic religion.

Thus in effect -- though not in intent -- the allies' triumph over Hitler was also a victory over Odin, Thor and all the other members of his Germanic pantheon. It was the second great triumph of civilization in Europe.

There is another ironic coincidence between the Boniface story and contemporary history. The Frankish ruler who, together with Pope Gregory II, sent this Benedictine friar to the dense forests covering much of central and northern Germany in 721, was Charles Martel, Charlemagne's grandfather.

It was Charles Martel, "the Hammer," who in the battle of Poitiers in 732 A.D. saved Europe from the first Muslim conquest; 732 was also the year when the pope -- now Gregory III -- sent Boniface the "pallium" traditionally worn by a metropolitan of the church (Boniface was by now bishop of Mainz on the Rhine).

Among many Europeans concerned with the perceived threat of an impending new Muslim "conquest" -- albeit a peaceful one this time, as a result of by mass migration -- Charles Martel has become a historical cult figure, just as young Germans today venerate Boniface as a historical example to be followed in an era marked by self-absorption and a dearth of contemporary role models.

Boniface did not leave England to get mindlessly sloshed on the beaches of Spain, as do hundreds of thousands every summer now, to the dismay of the locals and many of their own compatriots. He left, rather, following the ascetic ideal of "peregrinatio pro Christo," leaving everything behind, including one's homeland, simply to follow Christ.

He never ceased to yearn for England as he and his companions braved on barges the dangerous rivers of today's German states of Hesse, Saxony and Thuringia, following the papal command to "visit the savage peoples of Germany and plow the untilled fields of their hearts with the Gospel."

Behind makeshift barricades protecting him from wild beasts during these expeditions, he penned a host of letters and poems many of which survived. They spoke of his homesickness for England, and -- already in those days -- morally corrupt clerics he encountered.

It was Boniface who led Germany, now the geographical center of the European Union, out of the wilderness and linked it to the universal church under the pope in Rome, thus westernizing it. It was he who brought the legacy of Roman civilization -- a cultural inheritance with roots both in antiquity and Christianity -- to the land that would become the very heart of the Holy Roman Empire centuries later.

Its cathedrals, its musical masterpieces, its great works of art, its theology, philosophy and the scientific accomplishments are, in a sense, his bequest. Well before Charlemagne, this saint was the "pater Europae," wrote Walter Brandmueller, president of the Pontifical Committee on Historical Sciences in the Vatican.

And that makes the European Union's refusal to acknowledge Christianity's culture-shaping role in its new constitution all the more unfathomable.

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