The Commission from Rome

After the failure in Frisia, Wynfrith did not seek a new local patron; he went to the source of authority. In 718–719 he traveled to Rome, was received by Pope Gregory II, was given a new name — Boniface — and received an explicit papal commission to preach to the heathen peoples of Germany. This file examines that decisive act: the journey, the new name, the letter of commission, the later renewals and the episcopal consecration of 722, and the deliberate strategic meaning of grounding the German mission in the authority of the see of Rome — read carefully in its pre-Schism setting.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Apostle of the Germans; martyr)

The Journey to Gregory II

In the autumn of 718, his abbacy declined for a second time, Wynfrith set out for Rome (Willibald, Vita Bonifatii 5; trans. Talbot 1954). He carried a letter of recommendation from Daniel, bishop of Winchester — the same Daniel who would later be his correspondent and adviser on missionary method — and he made the long journey across Frankish Gaul and over the Alps to the city of the apostles (Willibald, Vita Bonifatii 5; Talbot 1954; Wood 2001). He came not as a suppliant seeking ordination he could have had at home, but as a missionary seeking a mandate; the Vita presents the visit as the deliberate act of a man who had concluded that the work he intended could only be done under the highest authority (Willibald, Vita Bonifatii 5; Talbot 1954).

He was received over the winter of 718–719 by Pope Gregory II (715–731), who questioned him about his faith and his purpose and, satisfied, gave him his commission (Willibald, Vita Bonifatii 5; Talbot 1954). The commission was issued in a formal letter, dated 15 May 719, instructing him to go to the peoples still in the error of unbelief and to preach to them the gospel, using the discipline of the Catholic and apostolic Church (Tangl 12 / Emerton, Letter 12; trans. Emerton 1940; Levison 1946). It is the founding document of his mission.

The New Name

It was Gregory II who gave Wynfrith the name by which history knows him. Willibald reports that the pope, on the feast of Saint Boniface, renamed him Boniface — Bonifatius, “doer of good” — and that thereafter he used this name (Willibald, Vita Bonifatii 5; Talbot 1954; on the renaming, Wood 2001). [Disputed: the precise occasion and significance of the renaming are uncertain; Willibald associates it with the pope and with the saint of that name, but the documentary record is not fully consistent — an early papal letter still addresses him as Wynfrith, and scholars debate whether the name was bestowed at the first Roman visit of 719 or formalized at the consecration of 722 (see Levison 1946; Wood 2001)]. Whatever the exact mechanics, the renaming is symbolically exact: the Anglo-Saxon Wynfrith took, from the hand of the pope, a Latin name, and with it a new identity as the apostle the Roman Church was sending to the Germans. The man and the mission were, from this point, Roman-commissioned.

The Episcopal Consecration of 722

The commission of 719 sent Boniface as a missionary priest; he spent the next two years in the field, working briefly again in Frisia under Willibrord after Radbod’s death and then turning to Hesse, where his preaching met with success (Willibald, Vita Bonifatii 5–6; Talbot 1954; see Hesse and Thuringia). The fruit of that work brought him back to Rome. In 722 Gregory II summoned him, examined him again — requiring of him a written profession of faith — and on 30 November 722 consecrated him a bishop, a missionary bishop without a fixed see, for the German lands (Willibald, Vita Bonifatii 6; Talbot 1954; Tangl 16–17, the profession and the consecration; Emerton, Letters 16–17; Levison 1946). At the same time the pope furnished him with letters of commendation to Charles Martel and to the Christians and clergy of the regions where he would work (Tangl 17–20 / Emerton, Letters 17–20; Emerton 1940). The consecration of 722 turned the missionary priest into an apostolic bishop answerable directly to Rome — the institutional form his whole later organization of the German church would take.

The relationship deepened further over time. Gregory III (731–741) sent Boniface the pallium and raised him to the rank of archbishop with authority to ordain bishops for the German church (Willibald, Vita Bonifatii 6; Talbot 1954; Tangl 28 / Emerton, Letter 26; Levison 1946); later still he was associated with the see of Mainz. Three successive popes — Gregory II, Gregory III, and Zacharias — backed his mission, answered his questions, confirmed his foundations, and received his reports, and the surviving correspondence with them is one of the richest such exchanges to survive from the early medieval West (see The Correspondence).

The Oath

A document of special interest is the oath of obedience Boniface swore at his consecration in 722. He bound himself, in writing laid upon the body of Saint Peter, to maintain the faith and unity of the Roman Church, to remain in obedience to the apostolic see, and — in a clause sometimes noted — to have no communion with bishops who acted contrary to the canons, but to report them to the pope (Tangl 16 / Emerton, Letter 16; trans. Emerton 1940; Levison 1946). The oath was modeled on the form sworn by the suburbicarian bishops of the Roman province, adapted for a missionary bishop. Its existence is a plain fact of the record and is central to the question of Boniface’s “Roman loyalty”; the meaning of that loyalty in a pre-Schism setting — what such an oath did and did not imply about later claims of papal jurisdiction — is examined in its own file and must not be read anachronistically (see A Roman Loyalist and the Undivided Church).

The Strategic Meaning

Why did Boniface ground his mission in Rome? The answer is partly the inheritance of his church — the Anglo-Saxons had chosen Rome at Whitby, and Willibrord too had sought papal consecration — and partly the hard lesson of the Frisian failure: a mission needed an authority that transcended the shifting fortunes of local rulers (Wood 2001; see The First Frisian Attempt). But it was also a deliberate strategy with concrete advantages. Roman authorization gave Boniface a standing independent of, and superior to, the often-irregular local clergy he would have to discipline; it gave his foundations a legitimacy that could be invoked against rival bishops and grasping nobles; and it allowed him to import a single, coherent canonical and liturgical order — Roman order — into a German and Frankish church that had drifted into disarray (Wood 2001; Palmer 2009; Sullivan 1953).

It is important to read this in its eighth-century proportions. Boniface’s Rome was the Rome of the undivided Church — a Rome of immense apostolic prestige, the see of Peter and Paul, the touchstone of orthodoxy and canonical order in the West, but not yet the Rome of the high-medieval papal monarchy or of the doctrines that would divide East and West after 1054. His turn to Rome was the turn of a Western churchman of the first millennium to the senior apostolic see of his own half of the still-undivided Church; what it meant, and what it did not mean, is the subject of Section 08. Here the point is simpler and historical: the commission from Gregory II in 719, renewed and elevated in 722 and after, is the structural fact of Boniface’s career. Everything he built in Germany, he built as the pope’s man.

See Also

• The First Frisian Attempt — the failure that sent him to Rome
• Hesse and Thuringia — the commission put to work
• The Correspondence — the rich exchange with the popes
• A Roman Loyalist and the Undivided Church — reading his Roman loyalty without anachronism
• Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism — the later divergence not yet present in Boniface’s day

References

• Willibald. The Life of Saint Boniface (Vita Bonifatii). Trans. C. H. Talbot, in The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany. London: Sheed & Ward, 1954. (The journey to Rome, the reception by Gregory II, and the new name at ch. 5; the consecration of 722, the pallium, and the archiepiscopal elevation at ch. 6.)
• The Letters of Saint Boniface. Trans. Ephraim Emerton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1940. (The commission of 15 May 719, Letter 12; the profession of faith and oath of 722, Letter 16; the consecration and commendatory letters, Letters 17–20; the pallium, Letter 26.)
• Levison, Wilhelm. England and the Continent in the Eighth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946. (The Roman documents, the dating of the commission and consecration, the form of the oath.)
• Wood, Ian. The Missionary Life: Saints and the Evangelisation of Europe, 400–1050. Harlow: Longman, 2001. (The strategy of Roman authorization; the renaming; the early career.)
• Palmer, James T. Anglo-Saxons in a Frankish World, 690–900. Turnhout: Brepols, 2009. (The Roman–Frankish–Anglo-Saxon triangle of Boniface’s mission.)
• Sullivan, Richard E. “The Carolingian Missionary and the Pagan.” Speculum 28 (1953): 705–740. (The institutional logic of papally-authorized mission.)