Thomas Becket gave Henry II the chancellor’s ring back when the king made him Archbishop of Canterbury. Henry was at that time engaged in a good enterprise, making a national state (also with a bad enterprise, messing around in France) and furious that Thomas didn’t see the church as having a duty to advance Henry’s program. I think Thomas understood, as Henry did not, that independent moral guidance from things like churches is indispensable to good governance, and that the enduring scarce resource for managers is not only honest counsel, uncomfortable or not, but also honest counsel that others can see that you have received.
That kind of honest advice and comment is also one of the things universities are supposed to give us, even when we don’t like what some tenured prof doing his own thinking says, so it’s a good day when a bunch of academic clerics, rejoicing in the religious freedom our founders put in place and stepping up to accept the duties it entails, play Thomas to John Boehner and his band of freebooters. You rock, profs and padres. (HT Digby)
So the church should be behind big social welfare programs? I thought the church was a big social welfare program. You give to the church and they give to the needy. The government has replaced the church as our welfare state, and I don’t think the outcome has been good.
I think this is a misunderstanding of the political context around Becket’s appointment as Archbishop. Henry may have stashed him there in order to get rid of him at court, as he had served the prior Archbishop and Henry thought Becket had never been aligned with the monarchy.
“Henry was at that time engaged in a good enterprise, making a national state (also with a bad enterprise, messing around in France)..”
This is hindsight. Henri was a Frenchman (I follow Norman Davies in giving him the Anglo-Norman-Angevin kings the names they went by). The state he tried to build was a cross-Channel empire run by a French-speaking élite. His family is buried at Fontevrault near the Loire, the heart of his realm. The way things worked out was that the French half collapsed - partly because his sons were incompetent, partly because their Capetian rival Philippe-Auguste was anything but. Henri’s great innovations - especially trial by jury - had no particular national character. English national identity grew to occupy his framework: you’d never guess from Magna Carta that trial by jury was invented by Jean’s foreign dad.
The framing of the quarrel with Becket as over the freedom to criticise is also anachronistic; it reflects Eliot’s and Anouilh’s free interpretations of the quarrel for the 20th century. The main thing at the time was Henri’s desire to bring clergy - an awful lot of people once you counted minor orders - who had committed common crimes like theft and murder within the reach of the royal courts and not the easier-going church tribunals. Becket was defending the Church as a legally autonomous state-within-the-state. On this one, most of us would back Henri.
From the apostles to the present, the Magisterium of the Church has insisted that those in power are morally obliged to preference the needs of the poor.
Michael O’Hare…
Speaking of few in power looking out for the poor…
Did you see Robert Reich’s 30 minute address to the CA Dem Party?
Call it his “Connecting 5 dots speech”…
Every progressive politician, voter, and pundit should have the arc of that argument inculcated.
It’s brilliant in its simplicity and laser focus:
http://robertreich.org/post/5248397580
Shakes, it is a bold counter-factual, but just try and imagine for a moment all of the social welfare that the government does (including public education - at least that which emphasizes added services to poor children), and then imagine it vanished. Now try and imagine the extent to which religious organizations would be able to step up and accomplish those (assumedly) worthy goals. I work with poor children everyday and believe me, in your universe they would be surely destroyed in your social-darwinist vision, their access to freedom and the pursuit of happiness severely curtailed.
If I recall correctly, “Catholic Charities” gets about 90% of its funding from the Federal government.
Michael: Completely off topic, but apropos a post of yours dated Aug 6, 2007.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3136
Just realized that I should have given the link to the M. Ohare post:
https://thesamefacts.com/2007/08/language-and-usage/writing/
Henri? Thomas never aligned…? Oh, you guys are talking about the historical figures! I meant (and should have made clear) the characters in Murder in the Cathedral. Here at the _Artistic Reality_-Based Coalition, we…oh, never mind
.
It is nice to see some of the lefty Catholics speaking up. We hear a lot from the other ones.
Now they need to go after capital punishment.
Michael: your sword is sufficient, you don’t have to fall on it.