This year, the Day of St Boniface, the patron saint of the Dutch diocese of Groningen-Leeuwarden, will be ecumenically celebrated in Dokkum, a town with a population of few thousands, famous for being the place in which the Anglo-Saxon missionary Boniface was killed on June 5th 754, along with 52 Benedictine brethren, by a gang of criminals. It is a long tradition, that of the Bonifatiusdag (St Boniface’s Day), which is celebrated with a procession from the Church of St Boniface to the park dedicated to the saint, which hosts a chapel and a spring that the missionary saint is said to have miraculously wanted to appear. In 2016, St Boniface’s Day will be, though, the first one to be lived along with the Protestant Churches, as explained to SIR by the diocese’s press attaché, Sipke Draisma. The celebrations will start in the evening of Friday 10th with the ecumenical Vespers. On Saturday, the town’s churches will host a number of initiatives, the highlight of which will be a historical pilgrimage and Mass on Sunday 12th June. This year, the difference will be the ecumenical character of the event, Draisma adds, so that a letter written by Gerard de Korte, the bishop that moved from Groningen to the diocese of Den Bosch just a very few weeks ago, “will be read out in the Protestant Churches as well. In the letter, the bishop points out that all of us, Catholics and Protestants, have Boniface as the common founder of Christianity in our region”.