St. Boniface

Who they were

Wynfrith of Wessex, renamed Boniface, was the Anglo Saxon monk who became the apostle of Germany, and his defining scene is the oak. At Geismar, before a hostile crowd waiting for Donar's lightning, he took an axe to the thunder god's sacred oak, and when the tree came down and the sky did nothing, the watching people drew their own conclusion. Boniface built a chapel out of its timber.

The axe work was the famous part. The life's work was organization: dioceses erected, synods held, monasteries planted with Fulda above all, the Frankish church reformed in communion with Rome, and the alliance shaped that would carry Europe's next several centuries. At nearly eighty he went back to the frontier mission field of Frisia, and at Dokkum in 754 an armed band fell on his camp. He forbade his companions to defend him, and the tradition, anchored by a real object, says he raised a gospel book over his head as the blow came. The slashed Ragyndrudis Codex is kept at Fulda to this day.

Why people turn to St. Boniface

German families and parishes. Missionaries and church planters whose gift is structure rather than fire, since somebody has to build the thing the preaching fills. And with St. Ansgar, the two apostles of the north are the sowing and the harvest.

How to ask their intercession

Before the intimidating confrontation with something falsely held sacred, ask carefully. He took the axe to the tree in front of the people who worshipped it, and then built them something with it.