06/05/2026
Memorial of St. Boniface, Bishop and Martyr | June 5
When Boniface set out on his final missionary journey at the age of nearly eighty, he had already spent a lifetime doing what most men would have called enough... crossing from England to the Germanic lands, felling the sacred oak of Thor before a crowd that expected divine retribution, founding the Abbey of Fulda, organizing the scattered and half-pagan German Church into coherent dioceses, serving as Archbishop of Mainz.
He had written to the bishops of England: "Let us be neither dogs that do not bark nor silent onlookers."
He headed north the coastline where he had begun and failed forty years before. He knew what he was going back to and on June 5, 754, pagan raiders killed him and his companions as they prepared converts for Confirmation.
