We have been hearing from the letters of St Peter in our first readings. The purpose of these letters, written to the Christian communities living in Asia Minor, was to encourage them to be stedfast in God’s grace in the face of persecution and to encourage them to hold onto their faith as they awaited the second coming of Christ.
As I read this passage from 2nd Peter, I thought about the saint we celebrate today. When I was a missionary up in Winnipeg in Canada, I worked in the French section of town called St Boniface. In fact, Winnipeg, in the province of Manitoba, has the largest French speaking population in Canada outside of the province of Quebec. The cathedral for the French speaking Catholics is called St Boniface. I would pass the ruins of the large cathedral that was gutted by fire in the 1960s. It was a large structure that could be seen from the bridge that I crossed each day into that section of the city. At the time, I didn’t really know who St Boniface was. St Boniface, the saint we celebrate today, traveled from his native England in the 8th century to be a missionary of God’s word to the people of Germany. Boniface succeeded in bringing God’s word to that country when so many before him had failed. He spent 36 years as a missionary there and died a martyr’s death, but he is remembered for the faith that took root there. Boniface is a very popular saint all throughout Europe, with many churches and schools named after him. As Peter and Paul and some of the other early Church fathers wrote letters to the followers of Jesus in order to encourage them, many of Boniface’s letters remain. I will close with a great quote from St Boniface: “The Church is like a great ship being pounded by the waves of life’s different stresses. Our duty is not to abandon the ship, but to keep her on her course.”
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