Becket

Today is the Feast of Saint Thomas Becket. Even before my conversion, I always admired Saint Thomas.

It might have something to do with his name—as a child the only other famous Thomases I knew were Jefferson and Edison, and I didn’t much care for Edison.

I’d like to think it had more to do with talking Truth to power. The movie didn’t hurt either, though thanks to “Becket” and “A Man for All Seasons”, I constantly conflated Saints Thomas Becket and Thomas More in my head.

Can you blame me?

Name is Thomas – check
Friend of a king named Henry – check
Became his chancellor – check
Defended the rights of the Church against the King – check
Martyred by agents of the King – check
A Saint – check

It was only as I grew a little older that I realized they were two different people, living three centuries apart.

For one thing, Saint Thomas More had a trial—albeit a rigged trial, this being the reign of Henry VIII (that tyrant). Saint Thomas Becket, on the other hand, was slain while praying vespers at Canterbury Cathedral by four overenthusiastic knights of King Henry II, who thought they were doing their master a favour.

For another thing, Becket was archbishop of Canterbury, whereas More was a family man.

Becket of course is smack dab in the middle of my favourite period of history, the XIIth and XIIIth centuries of Christian Europe. By all accounts King Henry II regretted Becket’s death and did penance for it. Nothing at all to do with Henry VIII (that bum).

Upon his death, Saint Thomas Becket’s shrine at Canterbury became one of the great pilgrimage sites of the age. People came from all over Britain and beyond to pay their respects to this English saint and to pray for his intercession. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales pilgrims were heading there.

This is why, oddly enough, Becket finally does intersect with Henry VIII (that villain). It seems that when Henry VIII (that rogue) was doing his whole “all the Church lands and property belong to me now” thing, he took what he considered his family’s belated revenge against Saint Thomas Becket.

Becket in death had humiliated good King Henry II, and his shrine could not be allowed to stand as an indictment against the misuse of royal power against the Church. Henry VIII (that jerk) tore it down. The saint’s bones were scattered. The pilgrimages were forbidden. All mention of his name was removed from the official histories.

Eventually, the fires of the Reformation cooled, and nowadays a single forlorn candle marks the place where the great medieval shrine stood in Canterbury Cathedral. A pair of rusted swords hang near the spot where the Saint was martyred.

I think the thing that draws me to Becket now is his conversion. He was, to all accounts, a bit of a rascal and a rogue when Henry II appointed him archbishop. He was to be the King’s fox in the hen house, ruling the Church in England for the benefit of his King.

It was not to be. The bishop’s miter sobered him up something fierce.

From today’s Office of Readings, from a letter by Saint Thomas Becket:

As successors of the apostles, we [bishops] hold the highest rank in our churches; we have accepted the responsibility of acting as Christ’s representatives on earth; we receive the honour belonging to that office, and enjoy the temporal benefits of our spiritual labours.

It must therefore be our endeavour to destroy the reign of sin and death, and by nurturing faith and uprightness of life, to build up the Church of Christ into a holy temple in the Lord.

Hardly the words of a royal stooge. In fact, the letter goes on to extol the role of the Roman Pontiff as the source of teaching and judgment of disputes.

Three centuries later, these words haunted Henry VIII (that hypocrite) to the point of goading him into destroying the saint’s physical monuments.

I wonder if Henry ever understood that the most enduring monuments are not physical at all.

Some days, I wonder if I do.