Many people who venerate the name of Thomas Becket (and/or love the movie with Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole that carries his name) likely do not understand the cause for which he was martyred, and if they did learn
Many people who venerate the name of Thomas Becket (and/or love the movie with Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole that carries his name) likely do not understand the cause for which he was martyred, and if they did learn it, would likely be scandalized given our current presuppositions concerning the prerogatives of the omnipotent State as opposed to those of the relatively impotent Church.
For you see, one of the major points-of-contention between King Henry II and Archbishop Becket was the attempt by the king to bring “criminous clerics” under the immediate jurisdiction of the royal courts rather than the ecclesiastical courts. Becket himself had no desire to be lenient with these priests—quite the contrary—but he suspected (rightly, as it turns out) that the king would use the coercive power of the royal courts to threaten church officials with punishment in order to bring them more and more under his control.
“St. Thomas seems all along to have suspected Henry of a design to strike at the independence of what the king regarded as a too powerful Church,” the Catholic Encyclopedia tells us.
With this in view, Henry summoned the bishops at Westminster (1 October, 1163) to sanction certain as yet unspecified articles which he called his grandfather’s customs (avitæ consuetudines), one of the known objects of which was to bring clerics guilty of crimes under the jurisdiction of the secular courts. The other bishops, as the demand was still vague, showed a willingness to submit.
It may be that the king was honestly intent on a scheme of judicial reform, and that he found that the growing jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts (the publication of the “Decretum Gratiani” and the increased study of the canon law had made them very popular) was an obstacle in his way. But Becket, who knew him well, suspected that Henry was deliberately striking at the privileges of the Church….
Becket was right to be suspicious, as it turns out, for in fact, when the substance of these vague “customs” was at last revealed, it turned out that Henry had crafted them to transfer all sorts of causes—many regarding Church property rights, for example—from the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts to that of the King’s Courts. So too, appeals to Rome were limited, excommunication of the king’s officers and great vassals largely prohibited, and appropriation by the king of the revenues of bishoprics and abbeys sanctioned.
Does this start to ring a bell? The secular powers of the state begin a juridical process saying they merely want to punish “criminous clerics”—and of course, who could be opposed in principle to that? But as events unfold, the same laws are eventually used to dispossess the Church of its money, property, and traditional rights and privileges.
Do people now begin to understand why the New York Times and the Boston Globe (both owned by the same huge media corporation) trumpeted the pedophile scandal with stories daily. Have they followed up with an equal number of stories about the problems of pedophilia in public schools and in the general population? Not even close. Why do you suppose that is? Might it be because certain institutional powers have an interest in diminishing the authority of the Catholic Church, especially when it comes to issues such as abortion, euthanasia, and gay marriage?
Interesting, is it not, that several years hence, the only group in America that actually seems to still oppose sexual relations between adults and emerging adult teens is the Catholic Church. If both parties consent, it is increasingly argued, what’s the big deal?
I have no desire whatsoever to defend the clerics guilty of violating their sacred vows before God let alone the laws of the land. They have a serious Judge to face—one who insisted that “whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea” (Mt 18:6). And yet, by the same token, these men, as all human persons, deserve due process of law. So it is that one must distinguish clearly between efforts designed to bring real justice in accord with the truth, and those which are mere pretenses designed primarily to weaken the Church, the institution most likely to oppose the omnipotent claims to power of the State apparatus.
Most of us in the modern world can’t even imagine a legal system not under the complete control of the state—indeed, increasingly, under the jurisdiction of the federal government and especially federal judges. Law, Americans increasingly assume, following the guidance of the so-called “legal realists” who dominate the law schools, is simply what judges do. Maybe we need a 