The Fifth Day of Christmas: Becket

Happy fifth day of Christmas! Today the Church celebrates the martyrdom of the splendid Saint Thomas Becket. Having the birth name “Thomas”, I take Becket and Aquinas as patrons.

As we walk through the Christmas season day by day, many martyrs crowd round the crib of the infant Jesus. Saint Thomas, however, is the first of these whose story is not found in pages of the New Testament. He belongs to another age entirely – the high middle ages, in the very midst of the greatest attempt in human history to create a truly Christian civilization.

In the midst of this, Saint Thomas Becket is a contradiction.

This glorious Martyr did not shed his blood for the faith; he was not dragged before the tribunals of pagans or heretics, there to confess the truths revealed by Christ and taught by the Church.

He was slain by Christian hands; it was a Catholic King that condemned him to death; it was by the majority of his own brethren, and they his countrymen, that he was abandoned and blamed.

(The Liturgical Year, Dom Prosper Guéranger, O.S.B.)

How, then, is he a martyr?

He was following the words of Peter and the Apostles who, when they were told to cease teaching Truth, refused saying they said to “obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). While all Christians are enjoined to shed our own blood rather than deny the truths of the faith, pastors of souls are under a far heavier obligation to see this through.

It is for this reason that Saint Thomas is a martyr.

[T]he Church has put upon her altars the glorious Saint Thomas of Canterbury, who was slain in his Cathedral in the twelfth century because be resisted a King’s infringements on the extrinsic rights of the Church. She sanctions the noble maxim of Saint Anselm, one of Saint Thomas’s predecessors in the See of Canterbury: Nothing does God love so much in this world as the liberty of his Church …

But in what does this sacred liberty consist?

It consists in the Church’s absolute independence of every secular power in the ministry of the Word of God, which she is bound to preach in season and out of season, as Saint Paul says, to all mankind, without distinction of nation or race or age or sex: in the administration of the Sacraments, to which she must invite all men without exception, in order to the world’s salvation: in the practice, free from all human control, of the Counsels, as well as of the Precepts, of the Gospel: in the unobstructed intercommunication of the several degrees of her sacred hierarchy: in the publication and application of her decrees and ordinances in matters of discipline: in the maintenance and development of the Institutions she has founded: in holding and governing her temporal patrimony: and lastly in the defence of those privileges which have been adjudged to her by the civil authority itself, in order that her ministry of peace and charity might be unembarrassed and respected.

Such is the Liberty of the Church. It is the bulwark of the Sanctuary. Every breach there imperils the Hierarchy, and even the very Faith. A Bishop may not flee, as the hireling, nor hold his peace….

He is the Watchman of Israel: he is a traitor if he first lets the enemy enter the citadel, and then, but only then, gives the alarm and risks his person and his life. The obligation of laying down his life for his flock begins to be in force at the enemy’s first attack upon the very outposts of the City, which is only safe when they are strongly guarded.

(The Liturgical Year, Dom Prosper Guéranger, O.S.B.)

Previous articles on Saint Thomas Becket:

2016: On Obedience and Confusion
(Ruminations on obedience as the greatest freedom, touching on both the saint and more recent history)

2015: On Pilgrimage
(Further thoughts on pilgrimage)

2014: A Happy Death
(Thoughts on the saint’s martyrdom and the grace of a happy death)

2012: Becket and Chaucer
(A meditation on pilgrimage)

2011: Saint Thomas Becket
(G.K. Chesterton on Becket’s martyrdom)

2010: Becket
(Becket, More, and Henry VIII (that jerk))

2009: Saint Thomas Becket
(Becket’s martrydom, an eyewitness account)

In 2013 and 2017, I failed to post anything. That’s going to happen from time to time.

I encourage you to peruse the past articles and see if you can’t watch the magnificent film, Becket.

Here follows one of the film’s many memorable scenes.

O God, who gave the Martyr Saint Thomas Becket
the courage to give up his life for the sake of justice,
grant, through his intercession,
that, renouncing our life
for the sake of Christ in this world,
we may find it in heaven.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.

Amen.

Saint Thomas Becket, pray for us.