Saint Thomas Becket, Obedience, and the Sacred Liturgy

Happy fifth day of Christmas! Today the Church celebrates the anniversary of the martyrdom of Saint Thomas Becket. Over the years, I’ve written many articles on St. Thomas Becket, one of my favourite saints. I’ve provided links to them below.

While thinking about what new thing I could say about this great saint, it occurred to me that this year it might be timely to reprise and substantially revise an older essay for new times. It is, as I say, timely in this year of confusion and question.

Obedience in the Holy Rule

Today’s reading from the Holy Rule of Saint Benedict is the second chapter from the end, Chapter 71, which begins:

The brethren must render the service of obedience not only to the Abbot, but they must thus also obey one another, knowing that they shall go to God by this path of obedience.

This is not the first time that the Rule talks about obedience, of course. No, Saint Benedict starts right in the very first sentence of the prologue, when he says,

Listen, O my son, to the precepts of thy master, and incline the ear of thy heart, and cheerfully receive and faithfully execute the admonitions of thy loving Father, that by the toil of obedience thou mayest return to Him from whom by the sloth of disobedience thou hast gone away.

And of course, there’s that famous chapter 68, titled “If a Brother Is Commanded to Do Impossible Things”. Short answer: try to do it anyway.

His most pointed discussion of obedience, however, is just before the start of the sequence of chapters where he lays out the twelve degrees (or steps) of humility. Humility, of course, is the virtue that stands against the cardinal sin of pride. Pride is not just one of the seven deadly sins, it is as Saint Thomas Aquinas tells us, “the beginning of all sins”¹, for it is the sin of Satan himself, and also the subsequent sin of Adam and Eve.

Saint Benedict tells us in chapter 5 of the Holy Rule,

The first degree of humility is obedience without delay. This becometh those who, on account of the holy subjection which they have promised, or of the fear of hell, or the glory of life everlasting, hold nothing dearer than Christ. As soon as anything hath been commanded by the Superior they permit no delay in the execution, as if the matter had been commanded by God Himself. Of these the Lord saith: “At the hearing of the ear he hath obeyed Me” (Ps 17[18]:45). And again He saith to the teachers: “He that heareth you heareth Me” (Lk 10:16).

And then again, two chapters later,

The first degree of humility, then, is that a man always have the fear of God before his eyes (cf. Ps 35[36]:2), shunning all forgetfulness and that he be ever mindful of all that God hath commanded, that he always considereth in his mind how those who despise God will burn in hell for their sins, and that life everlasting is prepared for those who fear God. And whilst he guardeth himself evermore against sin and vices of thought, word, deed, and self-will, let him also hasten to cut off the desires of the flesh.

I hasten to point out that “fear of the Lord” does not mean the “servile” or dread fear of punishment, but rather a “filial” fear of disappointing a loving Father².

Saint Benedict equates obedience with the fear of the Lord.

In our fear of disappointing our Father, we meekly obey His commandments and teachings. Why? Because Dad knows what’s best for us. We thrive when we live the life He has set out for us.

The Greatest Freedom

When I was in college, I was very much anti-Catholic. I found the whole of the faith absurd and the teachings of the Church (as I knew them) to be directly opposed to logic and common sense.

As what I considered the ultimate example of Catholicism’s Orwellian-level disconnect from reality, I obtained a used book titled Obedience – the Greatest Freedom. The person who gifted it had inscribed on the flyleaf “as history not religion”. I would show off this book whenever I wanted to prove my point.

I never actually read the book.

Had I done so, I would have discovered Saint Benedict’s argument. This was a book (published in the year I was born) written for those in religious orders.

I would have discovered a coherent, logical, and breathtakingly spiritual view of the world, perhaps summed up best in this book by Very Rev. Adolphe Tanquerey, S.S., D.D., who wrote,

Nothing is painful to him who loves, because he thinks not of the suffering undergone, but of the person for whose sake he suffers. Now, if we see Our Lord in the person of him who commands, how can we fail to offer with our whole heart the trifling sacrifice that He demands, who died a Victim of Obedience for our sake.

I would also have discovered a nuanced and thorough discussion on all the facets of obedience, including obedience to lawful authority, which by a long route brings us back to Saint Thomas Becket.

The Disobedience of Saint Thomas Becket

So, I’ve told the story of the saint’s martyrdom before, but let’s step back a moment to some of the threads that wove that tapestry.

Thomas was Chancellor of the Kingdom of England, and later Archbishop of Canterbury. He owed obedience to two earthly authorities, to the Pope and to the King.

This was further complicated by the fact that King Henry was his good friend – and indeed had appointed him Chancellor and arranged to him to be made Archbishop.

Nevertheless, Thomas as Archbishop upheld the rights of the Church against his King.

He renounced the anti-Church Constitutions of Clarendon. He fought for the rights of his priests, for the lands of the church, and for the traditional rights of the Church (and especially the Pope) in England.

In doing so, he disobeyed his King, who was determined to bring the Church to heel. It was, in fact, the reason he had secured his friend Thomas for the position in the first place.

Now, Catholic theology and common sense argue that while obedience to lawful authority is obligatory, obedience to unlawful authority may be gravely wrong.

There are, then, limits to set to the exercise of authority. It is evident that it is neither obligatory nor permissible, to obey a superior who would give a command manifestly opposed to divine or ecclesiastical laws. In this case we should have to repeat the words of St. Peter: “We ought to obey God, rather than man” (Acts 5:29) – words that proclaim and vindicate Christian liberty against all tyranny.

(Tanquerey, quoted in Obedience – the Greatest Freedom, 1966, p. 243)

There is obviously a great deal of discernment that must go on here, for obedience – even if should seem impossible – should be our first impulse.

In imitation of Christ, Thomas obeyed God rather than Man, and he paid the price with his life. It is the very reason we honour him as a martyr. It is what we are all called to do, if necessary.

Traditionis Custodes

Back in July, Pope Francis issued the motu proprio Traditionis custodes, which essentially repealed Pope Benedict XVI’s liberalization of the Traditional Latin Mass in Summorum Pontificum. Right at Christmas, the Congregation for Divine Worship issued some “clarifications” that further restricted the use of the older form of the Mass. These ranged from the silly to the sublime, and included an instruction that times when the Latin Mass is celebrated cannot be published in parish bulletins.

Needless to say, those drawn to the celebration of the Sacred Liturgy in this form are despondent. Not only is the Mass being restricted, but the reasons given fly in the face of both logic and facts on the ground.

And I for one am bemused that the “dubia” questioning the details were answered in six months. We are still awaiting the answer to the four Cardinals (several now deceased) who submitted their own dubia to the Pope’s post-synodal apostolic exhortation Amoris Lætitia five years ago. It’s pretty clear where the priorities of the Pope’s chancery are.

Perhaps the best take on Traditionis custodes is provided by Shaun Blanchard in his essay “Traditionis Custodes Was Never Merely About the Liturgy“. In it he says,

The “issue under the issues” is Vatican II. If the lex orandi (law of prayer) is the lex credendi (law of belief), as the venerable old adage goes, then we should not be surprised that just beneath the surface of this liturgical decree lays the real concern of Francis’s striking intervention: the legacy of the Second Vatican Council and the contested lex credendi of the Catholic Church. 

The author argues that obedience to the Second Vatican Council is, in the Pope’s mind, irrevocably bound up in obedience to the Papacy itself. The conflation of the pre-conciliar liturgy with disobedience is found throughout the Pope’s document and the clarification. It is clear from this that the Pope favours the “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture” espoused by those who follow the “spirit” of the Council but not necessarily the letter of its documents.

And I am not the first person to notice that Pope Francis offers mercy and brotherhood with all – except those who prefer the celebration of the sacraments in their older forms.

So what to do?

We must obey, no matter how much it may hurt or how much we are convinced that it is wrongheaded or even illegitimate. We must obey.

And What Does Obedience Look Like?

I would like to propose that in fidelity we obey the entirety of Traditionis Custodes, its accompanying Papal letter, and the norms established by the CDW. And not just the parts that get the press. In particular, I would like to call your attention to the letter Pope Francis sent to accompany the motu proprio, particularly ¶6, which says in part:

I am saddened by abuses in the celebration of the liturgy on all sides. In common with Benedict XVI, I deplore the fact that “in many places the prescriptions of the new Missal are not observed in celebration, but indeed come to be interpreted as an authorization for or even a requirement of creativity, which leads to almost unbearable distortions”.³

and also the part of ¶7 that says:

It must therefore be maintained that the Roman Rite, adapted many times over the course of the centuries according to the needs of the day, not only be preserved but renewed “in faithful observance of the Tradition”. ⁴ Whoever wishes to celebrate with devotion according to earlier forms of the liturgy can find in the reformed Roman Missal according to Vatican Council II all the elements of the Roman Rite, in particular the Roman Canon which constitutes one of its more distinctive elements.

Let this be our clarion call:

Celebrate the Sacred Liturgy using the Missale Romanum of 1970 in conformity with its rubrics and its General Instruction and “in faithful observance of the Tradition”. What does this look like? Probably not like your typical American parish Mass.

• Eschew creativity and embrace beauty.
• Sing the Mass propers.
• Celebrate with dignity and beauty and humility.
• Sing the Mass itself, and do so in Gregorian Chant and Latin as the General Instruction tells us to.

Remember that Pope Francis himself has admonished us to “be vigilant in ensuring that every liturgy be celebrated with decorum and fidelity to the liturgical books promulgated after Vatican Council II, without the eccentricities that can easily degenerate into abuses.”⁵

One good resource for putting this plan into operation is the podcast by The Liturgy Guys. They’re spending all of season six exploring exactly these points. As I write this, they’ve gotten as far as the entrance chant.

Conclusion

The Church has lived through moments of confusion – not to mention the worse crises of schism and heresy – many times before. There is nothing new under the sun. But we are formed in our love and obedience by the twin pillars of Holy Scripture and Sacred Tradition and, as Chesterton reminds us,

Whatever the men of the Church say, whether it be Truth or error, the whole of the Church through the ages dwells in the Truth of Christ.

So be not afraid! Dwell simply in the love of God and obedience to Him and to His Church. Cast confusion aside and live in the serene confidence that Christ has already won the war against sin and death.

Truth is never confused.

The prelates and theologians will eventually come around to the Eternal Truth – that is the very definition of the Magisterium – and if we have sat in humility and obedience, we may find that through God’s grace we have already been awaiting them there.

Saint Thomas Becket, pray for us.

Previous articles on Saint Thomas Becket:

2020: Saint Thomas Becket
(The saint’s treasured “little book” found at last)

2018: Becket
(On martyrdom and liberty, with some help from Dom Prosper Guéranger, O.S.B.)

2016: On Obedience and Confusion
(Ruminations on obedience as the greatest freedom, touching on both the saint and Amoris Lætitia)

2015: On Pilgrimage
(A deeper look into pilgrimages and why we do them)

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)

Please pray for me and all pilgrims that walk upon the earth.

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,
God, for ever and ever.

Amen.

1. Summa Theologica, IIa-IIæ, Q. 162.
2. Summa Theologica, IIa-IIæ, Q. 19
3. Benedict XVI, Letter to the Bishops on the occasion of the publication of the Apostolic Letter “Motu proprio data” Summorum Pontificum on the use of the Roman Liturgy prior to the reform of 1970, 7 july 2007: AAS 99 (2007) 796.
4. Cfr. Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Costitution[sic] on the sacred liturgy “Sacrosanctum Concilium”, 4 december 1963, n. 3: AAS 56 (1964) 98.
5. Letter of the Holy father to the bishops of the whole world, that accompanies the apostolic Letter motu Proprio Traditionis custodes, ¶12.