On the Feast of the Translation of St Thomas Becket, on 7 July, I was in Canterbury to join the pilgrims attending the celebration Mass in the Cathedral, with the Papal Nuncio.
It was profoundly moving on many levels at once. Nearly 800 Catholics streamed into the Quire—more than had gathered there since the sixteenth century.
It was the first time a Papal Nuncio had celebrated Mass since 1520. It was also the first time I had entered the Cathedral and witnessed it celebrate the Catholic liturgy it had been built and conceived to host.
For personal reasons, this meant a great deal to me.
I had been sent to the school surrounding the Cathedral, begun by St Augustine in 597 and continuing to this day. As a result, I grew up walking in and through the Cathedral daily. I slipped into the cloisters after midnight in pyjamas, cloaked in plaid rugs, to learn to smoke a pipe in the more distant corners. I was confirmed as an Anglican teenager by the Archbishop of Canterbury at the steps leading up to the high altar. I sang Byrd and Palestrina in the sombre, all-enclosing darkness of Advent processions. I sat in the northern transept at the spot where Thomas Becket was murdered and found myself talking—or praying—to him as a teenager grappling with what I thought, at the time, was abusive authority. He became something of a patron saint to a young adolescent Protestant deist. Little did I know that, decades later, I would return, received into the Catholic Church, penitent and joyful, to celebrate the feast of his Translation.
I have returned to Canterbury from time to time over the intervening decades.
I could not escape the impression that each time I returned—perhaps once a decade—the sanctity of the place, the shekinah, the ‘Presence’, seemed to have leaked away. The divine presence was being replaced by a divine absence—or so it seemed to me. I wondered whether I was being too fanciful. But on the few occasions I mentioned it to others, they responded—almost with the relief of not being alone—that they had exactly the same impression. It was like an elderly corpse on life support. ‘Ichabod.’
Recently, the attentive will have heard or seen that the gay-partnered Dean (why mention it?—the metaphysically competent will join the dots) turned the nave of the Cathedral into a nightclub. A ‘silent’ disco—headphone-operated dancing—in the nave, and yes, fuelled by alcohol, of course.
At the silent disco (February 2024), revellers donned LED-lit headphones and danced to a rotating playlist of ’90s-era tracks. Some of the more overtly sexualised or provocative lyrics came from the hip-hop/R&B channel, especially Eminem and Mousse T.
Trigger warning. If you are sensitive to material that might desecrate a cathedral—look away now or skip a paragraph:
During the track Horny ’98 by Mousse T, dancers heard the chorus echoing through the nave floors:
“I’m horny, horny, horny, horny, I’m horny, horny, horny, horny tonight.”
Eminem offered them:
“My bm is on your lips, if I’m lucky you might give it a little kiss,”*
alongside:
“If we can hump dead animals and antelopes,
then there’s no reason that a man and another man can’t elope.”
This was just one more step in the collapse of the Church of England into the quicksand of a sexualised secular culture.
But the Cathedral’s stones hold more than the blood of a Catholic martyr. They are also the stones walked upon, knelt upon, wept upon, prayed upon, beseeched upon by the waves of Catholic pilgrims who came to his shrine between 1170 and 1538 to ask, to pray, to seek, to yearn, to adore the living God that St Thomas Becket loved and served.
Scholarly estimates suggest that between 30,000 and 50,000 pilgrims made their way to Canterbury Cathedral each year for 368 years. That amounts to between 11 and 36 million penitents kneeling in prayer on the very stones the current Dean sold to a nightclub agency for entertainment tickets.
These stones were once holy. The space was sanctified and reserved for divine encounter, penitence, and praise. And quite astonishingly, as it turned out, for a flood of miracles.
In the first ten years after Becket’s death, the monks Benedict of Peterborough and William of Canterbury recorded 700 miracles they believed they could authenticate. These included accounts of physical healing, rescues from death—shipwrecks and imprisonment—healings from demonic possession, and even raising the dead on several occasions. But of course, that is merely the tip of an enormous iceberg.
Catholic churches and cathedrals are shaped by the concept that they function as reliquaries. They are designed to enshrine and elevate the sacred presence: above all, the Blessed Sacrament, but also relics of saints and their tombs.
There is a sense in which the entire building becomes an image of the heavenly Jerusalem—radiant, filled with precious materials, goldstone and stained glass—connected to the holy presence of Christ in both sacrament and relic. The structure, in this way, becomes a kind of cosmic reliquary, with Christ in the Eucharist accompanied by the sanctified remains of the saints honoured there.
When Henry VIII ordered the destruction of the shrine and the burning of St Thomas’s bones, it launched a repudiation not only of the authority of Peter but of the very power of the sacred. The Protestant rage—at once incoherent and destructive—was not just a movement of iconoclasm; it had a strategic goal: to remove the Mass from Catholic churches, communities, and the country, forever.
Alternative liturgies were devised to serve as memorial events for the Last Supper, but the Mass—the miracle of the eternal sacrifice of Christ—was repudiated, made illegal, and banned.
The result was the absence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament in every cathedral and Catholic church. The stone reliquaries were forcibly emptied.
Given that, if and when the Catholic community is invited back into a church or cathedral to celebrate the Mass and begin to heal centuries of repudiation and sacramental absence, it carries significance far beyond a simple liturgical return.
And so, on 7 July, as the Papal Nuncio returned to celebrate Mass with scores of priests and 800 worshippers—the largest number of Catholics in the Cathedral since 1538—some profound acts of healing took place. It was as if living blood had been poured into a corpse on a life-support machine, long neglected and sustained only by technology.
The defiled stones were washed in the radiance of Christ in the sacrament. The repudiation of the authority of St Peter was suspended—if only for a moment—by his personal representative, the Nuncio, praying at the high altar.
A moment of historical significance became a moment of prophetic promise. As the Church of England declines in numbers, influence, and orthodox spirituality, the Catholic Church is growing in renewal, conversions, and confidence. It is almost impossible to imagine a situation in which the state-sequestered churches and cathedrals are returned to their original owners. But the transformation of atmosphere, the irradiation of holiness, the congruity of liturgy, sacrament, and authority—all came together in this astonishing moment to honour the courage and integrity of St Thomas, and to ask his prayers.
