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Life of St Wilfrid
Eddius Stephanus, tr. Colgrave, 1927
5. How He Prosperously Reached the See of St Peter the Apostle
So, with joy and thankfulness, Wilfrid, the servant of God, and his companions safely reached their long-desired goal, the see of Peter the Apostle and the chief of the Apostles. Even as the most excellent teacher of the Gentiles wrote to the disciples of the Lord when he was making his way to Jerusalem, “lest by any means I should run or had run in vain”; so this lowly spark of fire, kindled in our race, was fanned to flame by God and came to Rome “from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom” of the rulers of the world.
In the oratory dedicated to St Andrew the Apostle, he humbly knelt before the altar above which the four gospels had been placed, and besought the Apostle, in the name of the Lord God for whom he suffered, that the Lord, by his intercession, would grant him a ready mind both to read and to teach the words of the Gospels among the nations. And thus it came to pass as many bear witness. For, during the course of his daily visits to the shrines of the saints to pray, a custom which he observed for many months, he met a teacher whom God and the Apostle made his faithful friend. This was Boniface the archdeacon, one of the wisest of the counsellors, from whom he learned the four Gospels of Christ perfectly and the Easter rule, of which the British and Irish schismatics were ignorant, and many other rules of ecclesiastical discipline. These things Boniface the archdeacon taught him diligently as though he were his own son. Finally he presented him to the Pope of blessed memory and explained to him with singular clearness the whole reason for the journey of the young servant of God. The Pope placed his blessed hand on Wilfrid’s head, prayed over him, and gave him his blessing. So the servant of God, with the aid of the holy relics which he found there, setting out in the peace of Christ, returned safely to his father, the Archbishop of Lyons (a city of Gaul).