Patronage
3 saints are venerated as patrons of Germany, led by Boniface of Mainz (feast day June 5).
c. 675 AD — June 5, 754 AD · Feast day: June 5
Boniface of Mainz, born Wynfrith around 675 in Crediton, Devon, organized the Church across pagan Germanic lands and most famously felled Donar's Oak at Geismar, building a chapel from its timbers. At nearly eighty, he returned to Frisia for a final mission and was martyred near Dokkum on June 5, 754, holding a Gospel book pierced by a sword.
Approx. 1030 AD — October 6, 1101 AD · Feast day: October 6
Bruno of Cologne abandoned a brilliant academic career — chancellor of the Archdiocese of Reims and teacher of a future pope — to found the Carthusian Order in a remote Alpine gorge in 1084. When his former student became Pope Urban II and summoned him to Rome, Bruno refused all honors, dying in a Calabrian hermitage in 1101 with the silence he had chosen over every offered bishopric.
January 6, 1256 AD — c. 1302 AD · Feast day: November 16
Gertrude the Great entered the Benedictine Monastery of Helfta at age five and never left — yet from that cloister she produced some of the most theologically precise mystical writing of medieval Germany. At twenty-five, a vision of Christ shattered her pride in learning and turned her entirely toward the Sacred Heart, making her its first great systematic theologian and the only woman saint to bear the title 'the Great.'