Weekend Read: Papal Nuncio Reclaims Canterbury Cathedral & Thomas Becket Springs to Life

Gavin Ashenden shares his experience of returning to his Childhood Cathedral as an adult Catholic

St Thomas Becket has long attracted my interest affection and allegiance.

At Canterbury this month a particularly important event was scheduled to take place. The feast of the translation of the shrine of Thomas Becket on July 8, and quite wonderfully the local Catholic parish in Canterbury had obtained permission to have a Catholic mass celebrated in the Cathedral, on this occasion by the Papal Nuncio. This would be the first time since 1520 a nuncio had celebrated mass in the first and oldest Catholic cathedral built in England.

I had been asked to give lecture on St Thomas Becket, and as I prepared to do it, I was struck by the force of how similar the issues that led to his death were to the ones that face us now.

At the heart of what he faced was illegitimate overreach by the state.

St Thomas More was to later face the same dynamics, and like Becket, the price for his integrity would be his life. Suddenly at this point in our culture, the state has invented crimes and begun to lock Catholics up for thought crime in general and praying in particular.

The discovery of exactly what Becket was struggling against in combination with the intense joy of being able to attend a mass in one of the most significant cathedrals the Catholic church built (before it was forcibly sequestered by the state) proved to be a heady combination.

The Mass itself was an amazing and astonishing event.

There have been a few catholic masses taking place in Canterbury Cathedral, a form of restrictive healing not lightly to be underestimated; but this one was particularly special.

It was celebrated by the papal nuncio. The last one had been celebrated by a cardinal which was dramatic enough, but this was something more. The papal Nuncio is pope Leo’s personal representative. It is as close as having the pope come himself as one can get.

Canterbury Cathedral is crying out for the pope. Is crying out for the presence of Jesus in the sacrament.

Ever since the protestant Church of England replaced the mass with a memorial service for Maunday Thursday, the miracle of the mass has been abolished and something more like a placebo is provided for the worshipers.

But there is a perception shared by very many people I have talked to who have visited Canterbury Cathedral, that in a strange way, hard to explain but still profoundly felt, it is leaking the presence of God in a disturbing way.

You may wonder what that means. You ought to wonder what that means.

I and many others have had the strong sense of the presence of God faintly residual in the memory of the stones, made sacred by the prayers of monks priests and pilgrims from the inception, and this has leaked out to be replaced by a frightening dull vacancy.

This can’t be unconnected with the desecration of the building with the decision of the administrators to turn it into a nightclub for dancing teenagers.

I was asked earlier on in the day to give a guided tour of the cathedral to a group of pilgrims, accompanied by the Vatican cricket team who were visiting the south of England at the time. We were in the middle of looking at the walls, the name of which no longer carries the stations of the cross or side orders for the celebration of the mass, but instead were studded with tributes to aristocratic families and lists of casualties in previous wars.

As we were taking in the way in which the spirit of Protestantism had emptied the cathedral of its main purpose (the celebration of the mass) and replaced the altars with nationalistic memorabilia, a bell chimed the hour, and a day chaplain lead some prayers from a hidden microphone, ending up with the Lord’s prayer. I asked my pilgrims and priest cricketers, if they felt up to joining me echoing the recitation of the Lord’s prayer in English, with singing it in Latin?

They all smiled widely and nodded their heads enthusiastically. And so it was that fifty Catholic voices broke out together into “Pater noster….qui es in caeils….” which echoed around the pillars and buttresses of this the oldest cathedral in the islands, and evoked the prayers, love and sacrifices of our Catholic ancestors who built, loved, worshipped and adored amidst the once sacred stones. The establishment wasn’t quite sure where the singing came from or why? There’s no guarantee that their Latin was up to recognising the Lord’s prayer!

We spent some time in the northern transept, the place where Becket was struck down. Towards the end of this piece, I will reproduce John Guys description of the martyrdom, from his biography of Becket, that, drawing from the original sources describes exactly what happened in that corner of the cathedral at the moment Beckett was murdered.

As part of the celebrations of the day I had been asked to give a lecture about the life of Thomas Becket, his martyrdom, his shrine, the miracles that followed and the Pilgrimages which followed the miracles.

My interest in Beckett began when I was 13 years old.

The school I was at surrounded the cathedral and there were a number of times when an obvious shortcut would take a boy through the building. I got to know it well and was always drawn to the place where Beckett was struck down.

Like everyone else I had been given the propagandised version of the conflict, but I knew enough to know that he as a Christian Catholic had set himself against the muscular authoritarianism of the state and paid the price with his life.

In a very simplistic way I too as a teenager