EASTERTIDE · 29 APRIL & CHRISTMASTIDE · 29 DECEMBER Martyrs of the Western Church
Catherine of Siena & Thomas Becket
Mystic, Tertiary & Archbishop · Martyrs of the Western Church · d. 1380 & 1170
Catherine — KATH-er-in · Siena — see-EN-a · stigmata — stig-MAH-ta · Avignon — ah-veen-YON · Becket — BEK-et · Constitutions of Clarendon — klar-EN-don · Theobald — THEE-oh-bald
O God, who didst give to thy servants Catherine and Thomas the courage to spend themselves wholly in the service of thy Church and to accept the cost of that service without flinching; Grant that we may love the Church as they loved it, without illusion and without desertion, knowing that to serve it faithfully may cost us everything; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
The medieval series closes with two martyrs who stand at the furthest possible remove from the quiet monastery at Zwolle where Thomas à Kempis spent his ninety-one years. Catherine of Siena (see-EN-a) and Thomas Becket (BEK-et) are the Church’s two great witnesses of costly public fidelity — the woman who died of her prayer in Rome at the age of thirty-three, having spent the last years of her life trying to hold together a Church collapsing under the weight of the Avignon papacy and the Great Schism, and the man who was murdered before his own altar in Canterbury by knights acting on the words of the king he had once served. Both Red. Catherine on 29 April in Eastertide, the season of the Resurrection’s first fruit; Becket on 29 December in the Christmastide, the season of the Incarnation’s first consequence. Between them they frame the whole liturgical year’s witness to what it means to love the Church at the full cost of that love.
Catherine Benincasa was the twenty-third of twenty-five children of a Sienese dyer. She joined the Third Order of St Dominic as a young woman — living in the world under a rule of prayer, fasting, and service — and for three years withdrew almost entirely into her cell, praying in solitude before emerging into the city where she nursed plague victims and tended the condemned. She received the stigmata (stig-MAH-ta) invisibly, at her own request — she did not want the wounds to be visible during her lifetime. She dictated her great mystical work the Dialogue (DY-ah-log) in ecstasy, the words flowing faster than her secretaries could write. What is less remembered than her mysticism is her political courage: she wrote to Pope Gregory XI in Avignon (ah-veen-YON), urging him in language of extraordinary directness to return the papacy to Rome, addressing him as Babbo mio — my dear Father — while simultaneously telling him that his failure of nerve was a scandal to Christendom and a wound to the body of Christ. She wrote to the leaders of Florence, to the English mercenaries ravaging Italy, to the Queen of Naples. She had no official standing, no ecclesiastical authority, no institutional power of any kind — only the clarity of her prayer and the fearlessness of her love. Gregory XI returned to Rome in 1377. She died in 1380, worn out at thirty-three, her body broken by fasting and her will unbroken by anything.
Thomas Becket’s story runs in the opposite direction from most saints’ lives. He was not formed from childhood in the spiritual life but was the consummate worldly man — Chancellor of England, brilliant administrator, companion to King Henry II, the most powerful layman in the kingdom — who was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1162 in what the king expected to be a political masterstroke, placing his trusted friend and servant at the head of the English Church. What followed was one of the most dramatic reversals in medieval history: Becket, on receiving the archiepiscopal ring, transformed himself almost overnight from the king’s man into the Church’s man, abandoned the luxuries of his previous life, wore a hair shirt under his episcopal vestments, and refused to ratify the Constitutions of Clarendon (klar-EN-don) by which Henry intended to subordinate ecclesiastical courts to royal authority. The dispute lasted eight years, included two periods of Becket’s exile in France, and ended on 29 December 1170 when four knights — acting on Henry’s furious rhetorical question, will no one rid me of this turbulent priest? — entered Canterbury Cathedral at Vespers and cut him down before the altar of St Benedict. He was canonised within three years, his shrine became the greatest pilgrimage site in England, and Henry himself walked barefoot to Canterbury to do penance at the tomb of the man his words had killed.
Catherine in April, Becket in December: two witnesses to the same truth at opposite ends of the year and opposite poles of the medieval religious life. Catherine was a woman without office, without learning in the formal sense, without institutional authority, who changed the course of Church history through sheer force of prayerful love and a willingness to speak truth to power that had no foundation in anything the world would recognise as authority. Becket was a man of enormous worldly power and institutional authority who discovered, late and decisively, that the authority of the Church to which he had committed his life ran deeper than any royal commission. She died of her love; he died for his office; both died in the service of the same Church. Their feast days seal the medieval series as martyrdom sealed the Patristic series — the tradition that began with Ignatius asking the Romans not to save him from the arena ends with Becket refusing to flee from the men entering his cathedral, and with Catherine refusing to take care of herself when the Church she loved was in danger of dissolution. The arc of the tradition is the arc of the Incarnation: God comes into the world and is not received, and the witnesses who receive him pay, in different measures and different forms, the same price.
O Almighty God, who by thy servant Catherine didst prove that love armed with prayer is stronger than all the powers of the world, and by thy servant Thomas didst show that the liberty of thy Church is worth a man’s life; Grant that we may serve thy Church with the same totality, and speak thy truth with the same fearlessness, until the cost of discipleship and the joy of discipleship are found to be one and the same gift; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.