St. Martin of Tours, November 11
and St. Thomas à Beckett, December 29

St. Martin of Tours, Bishop and Confessor

THREE thousand six hundred and sixty churches dedicated to St. Martin in France alone, [A list arranged according to the dioceses may be seen in the Appendix to 'Saint Martin' by Lacoy DE LA MARCHE.] and well-nigh as many in the rest of the world, bear witness to the immense popularity of the great thaumaturgus. In the country, on the mountains, and in the depth of forests; trees, rocks, and fountains, objects of superstitious worship to our pagan ancestors, received, and in many places still retain, the name of him who snatched them from the dominion of the powers of darkness to restore them to the true God. For the vanquished idols, Roman, Celtic, or German, Christ substituted their conqueror, the humble soldier, in the grateful memory of the people. Martin's mission was to complete the destruction of paganism, which had been driven from the towns by the Martyrs but remained up to his time master of the vast territories removed from the influence of the cities.

While on the one hand he was honoured with God's favours, on the other he was pursued by Hell with implacable hatred. At the very outset he had to encounter Satan, who said to him: 'I will beset thy path at every turn'; [SULPIT. SEVER. Vita, vi.] and he kept his word. He has kept it to this very day: century after century, he has been working ruin around the glorious tomb which once attracted the whole world to Tours: in the sixteenth, he delivered to the flames, by the hands of the Huguenots, the venerable remains of the protector of France; by the nineteenth, he had brought men to such a height of folly, as themselves to destroy, in time of peace, the splendid basilica which was the pride and the riches of their city. The gratitude of Christ and the rage of Satan, made known by such signs, reveal sufficiently the incomparable labours of the apostle, and monk, St. Martin.

A monk indeed he was, both in desire and in reality, to the last day of his life. 'From earliest infancy he sighed after the service of God. He became a catechumen at the age of ten, and at twelve he wished to retire to the desert; all his thoughts were engaged on monasteries and churches. A soldier at fifteen years of age, he so lived as even then to be taken for a monk. [SULPIT. SEVER. Vita, ii.] After a first trial of religious life in Italy, he was brought by St. Hilary to this solitude of Ligugé, which, thanks to him, became the cradle of monastic life in Gaul. To say the truth, Martin, during the whole course of his life, felt like a stranger everywhere else except at Ligugé. A monk by attraction, he had been forced to be a soldier, and it needed violence to make him a bishop: and even then he never relinquished his monastic habits. He responded to the dignity of a bishop, says his historian, without declining from the rule and life of a monk. [Ibid. x.] At first he constructed for himself a cell near his church of Tours; and soon afterwards built, at a little distance from the town, a second Ligugé, under the name of Marmoutier, or the great monastery.' [CARDINAL PIE, Homily pronounced on occasion of the re-establishment of the Benedictine Order at Ligugé, November 25, 1851.]

The holy liturgy refers to St. Hilary, the honour of the wonderful virtues displayed by Martin. [In festo S. Hilarii, Noct, II, Lect, ii.] What were the holy bishop's reasons for leading his heaven-sent disciple by ways then so little known in the West he has left us to learn from the most legitimate heir of his doctrine as well as of his eloquence. 'It has ever been,' says Cardinal Pie, 'the ruling idea of all the Saints that, side by side with the ordinary ministry of the pastors, obliged by their functions to live in the midst of the world, the Church has need of a militia, separated from the world and enrolled under the standard of evangelical perfection, living in self-renunciation and obedience, and carrying on day and night the noble and incomparable function of public prayer. The most illustrious pontiffs and the greatest doctors have thought that the secular clergy themselves could never be better fitted for spreading and making popular the pure doctrines of the Gospel, than if they could be prepared for their pastoral office by living either a monastic life, or one as nearly as possible resembling it. Read the lives of the greatest bishops both in East and West, in the times immediately preceding or following the peace of the Church, as well as in the Middle Ages: they have all, either themselves at some time professed the monastic life, or lived in continual contact with those who professed it. Hilary, the great Hilary, had, with his experienced and unerring glance, perceived the need; he had seen the place that should be occupied by the monastic Order in Christendom, and by the regular clergy in the Church. In the midst of his struggles, his combats, his exile, when he witnessed with his own eyes the importance of the monasteries in the East, he earnestly desired the time when, returning to Gaul, he might at length lay the foundations of the religious life at home. Providence was not long in sending him what was needful for such an enterprise: a disciple worthy of the master, a monk worthy of the bishop.' [CARDINAL PIE, ubi supra.]

On another occasion, comparing St. Martin, his predecessors, and St. Hilary himself, in their common apostolate of Gaul, the illustrious Cardinal says: 'Far be it from me to undervalue all the vitality and power already possessed by the religion of Jesus Christ in our divers provinces, thanks to the preaching of the first Apostles, Martyrs, and bishops, who may be counted back in a long line almost to the day of Calvary. Still I fear not to say it: the popular apostle of Gaul, who converted the country parts, until then almost entirely pagan, the founder of national Christianity, was principally St. Martin. And how is it that he, above so many other great bishops and servants of God, holds such pre-eminence in the apostolate? Are we to place Martin above his master Hilary? With regard to doctrine, certainly not; and as to zeal, courage, holiness, it is not for me to say which was greater, the master's or the disciple's. But what I can say is, that Hilary was chiefly a teacher, and Martin was chiefly a thaumaturgus. Now, for the conversion of the people the thaumaturgus is more powerful than the teacher; and consequently, in the memory and worship of the people, the teacher is eclipsed and effaced by the thaumaturgus.

'Nowadays there is much talk about the necessity of reasoning in order to persuade men as to the reality of Divine things: but that is forgetting Scripture and history; nay, more, it is degenerating. God has not deemed it consistent with His majesty to reason with us. He has spoken; He has said what is and what is not; and as He exacts faith in His word, He has sanctioned His word. But how has He sanctioned it? After the manner of God, not of man; by works, not by reasons: non in sermone, sed in virtute, not by the arguments of a humanly persuasive philosophy: non in persuasibilibus humanæ sapientice verbis, but by displaying a power altogether Divine: sed in ostensione spiritus et virtutis. And wherefore? For this profound reason: Ut fides non sit in sapientia hominum, sed in virtute Dei, that faith may not rest upon the wisdom of man, but upon the power of God. [1 Cor. ii. 4.] But now men will not have it so: they tell us that in Jesus Christ the theurgist wrongs the moralist; that miracles are a blemish in so sublime an ideal. But they cannot reverse this order; they cannot abolish the Gospel, nor history. Begging the pardon of the learned men of our age and their obsequious followers: not only did Christ work miracles, but He established the Faith upon the foundation of miracles.

And the same Christ-----not to confirm His Own miracles, which are the support of all others; but out of compassion for us, who are so prone to forgetfulness, and who are more impressed by what we see than by what we hear-----the same Jesus Christ has placed in His Church, and that for all time, the power of working miracles. Our age has seen some, and will see yet more. The fourth century witnessed in particular those of St. Martin.

'The working of wonders seemed mere play to him; all nature obeyed him; the animals were subject to him. "Alas!" cried the Saint one day: "the very serpents listen to me, and men refuse to hear me." Men, however, often did hear him. The whole of Gaul heard him; not only Aquitaine, but also Celtic and Belgic Gaul. Who could resist words enforced by so many prodigies? In all these provinces he overthrew the idols one after another, reduced the statues to powder, burnt or demolished all the temples, destroyed the sacred groves and all the haunts of idolatry. Was it lawful? you may ask. If I study the legislation of Constantine and Constantius, perhaps it was. But this I know: Martin, eaten up with zeal for the house of the Lord, was obeying none but the Spirit of God. And I must add that against the fury of the pagan population Martin's only arms were the miracles he wrought, the visible assistance of Angels sometimes granted him, and, above all, the prayers and tears he poured out before God, when the hard-heartedness of the people resisted the power of his words and of his wonders. With these means Martin changed the face of the country. Where he found scarcely a Christian on his arrival, he left scarcely an infidel at his departure. The temples of the idols were immediately replaced by temples of the true God; for, says Sulpicius Severus, as soon as he had destroyed the homes of superstition, he built churches and monasteries. It is thus that all Europe is covered with sanctuaries bearing the name of St. Martin.' [CARDINAL PIE, Sermon preached in the cathedral of Tours, on the Sunday following the patronal feast of St. Martin, November 14, 1858.]

Taken from THE LITURGICAL YEAR, Dom Guéranger, O.S.B., Book XV.

St. Thomas à Beckett, Archbishop of Canterbury and Martyr

ANOTHER Martyr comes today to take his place around the Crib of our Jesus. He does not belong to the first ages of the Church: his name is not written in the Books of the New Testament, like those of Stephen, John and the Innocents of Bethlehem. Yet does he stand most prominent in the ranks of that Martyr Host which has been receiving fresh recruits in every age, and is one of those visible abiding proofs of the vitality of the Church, and of the undecaying energy infused into her by her Divine Founder. This glorious Martyr did not shed his blood for the faith; he was not dragged before the tribunals of pagans or heretics, there to confess the truths revealed by Christ and taught by the Church. He was slain by Christian hands; it was a Catholic King that condemned him to death; it was by the majority of his own brethren, and they his countrymen, that he was abandoned and blamed. How, then, could he be a Martyr? How did he gain a Palm like Stephen's? He was the Martyr for the liberty of the Church.

Every Christian is obliged to lay down his life rather than deny any of the articles of our holy Faith: it was the debt we contracted with Jesus Christ when He adopted us in Baptism as His Brethren. All are not called to the honour of Martyrdom, that is, all are not required to bear that testimony to the Truth which consists in shedding one's blood for it: but all must so love their Faith as to be ready to die rather than deny it, under pain of incurring the eternal death from which the grace of our Redeemer has already delivered us.

The same obligation lies still more heavily on the Pastors of the Church. It is the pledge of the truth of their teachings. Hence we find in almost every page of the History of the Church the glorious names of saintly Bishops, who laid down their lives for the Faith they had delivered to their people. It was the last and dearest pledge they could give of their devotedness to the Vineyard entrusted to them, in which they had spent years of care and toil. The blood of their Martyrdom was more than a fertilizing element-----it was a guarantee, the highest that man can give, that the seed they had sown in the hearts of men was in very truth the revealed Word of God.

But beyond the debt which every Christian has, of shedding his blood rather than denying his Faith, that is, of allowing no threats or dangers to make him disown the sacred ties which unite him to the Church, and through her to Jesus Christ; beyond this, Pastors have another debt to pay, which is that of defending the liberty of the Church. To Kings and Rulers, and, in general to all diplomatists and politicians, there are few expressions so unwelcome as this of the liberty of the Church; with them it means a sort of conspiracy. The world talks of it as being an unfortunate scandal, originating in priestly ambition. Timid temporizing Catholics regret that it can elicit anyone's zeal, and will endeavour to persuade us that we have no need to fear anything, so long as our Faith is not attacked. Notwithstanding all this, the Church has put upon her altars the glorious St. Thomas of Canterbury, who was slain in his Cathedral in the twelfth century because he resisted a King's infringements on the extrinsic rights of the Church. She sanctions the noble maxim of St. Anselm, one of St. Thomas's predecessors in the See of Canterbury: Nothing does God love so much in this world as the liberty of His Church; and the Apostolic See declares by the mouth of Pius VIII, in the nineteenth century, the very same doctrine she would have taught by St. Gregory VII, in the eleventh century: The Church, the spotless Spouse of Jesus Christ the immaculate Lamb, is by God's appointment FREE, and subject to no earthly power. [L. Apostolicæ ad Episcopos Provinciæ. 30 Junii 1830.]

But in what does this sacred liberty consist? It consists in the Church's absolute independence of every secular power in the ministry of the Word of God, which she is bound to preach in season and out of season, as St. Paul says, to all mankind, without distinction of nation or race or age or sex: in the administration of the Sacraments, to which she must invite all men without exception, in order to the world's salvation: in the practice, free from all human control, of the Counsels, as well as of the Precepts, of the Gospel: in the unobstructed intercommunication of the several degrees of her sacred hierarchy: in the publication and application of her decrees and ordinances in matters of discipline: in the maintenance and development of the institutions she has founded: in holding and governing her temporal patrimony: and lastly in the defence of those privileges which have been adjudged to her by the civil authority itself, in order that her ministry of peace and charity might be unembarrassed and respected.

Such is the Liberty of the Church. It is the bulwark of the Sanctuary. Every breach there imperils the Hierarchy, and even the very Faith. A Bishop may not flee, as the hireling, nor hold his peace, like those dumb dogs of which the Prophet Isaias speaks, and which are not able to bark. [Isa. lvi 10.] He is the Watchman of Israel: he is a traitor if he first lets the enemy enter the citadel, and then, but only then, gives the alarm and risks his person and his life. The obligation of laying down his life for his flock begins to be in force at the enemy's first attack upon the very outposts of the City, which is only safe when they are strongly guarded.

The consequence of the Pastor's resistance may be of the most serious nature; in which event we must remember a truth which has been admirably expressed by Bossuet in his magnificent panegyric on St. Thomas of Canterbury, which we regret not being able to give from beginning to end. 'It is an established law,' he says, 'that every success the Church acquires costs her the life of some of her children, and that in order to secure her rights she must shed her own blood. Her Divine Spouse redeemed her by the Blood He shed for her; and He wishes that she should purchase on the same terms the graces He bestows upon her. It was by the blood of the Martyrs that she extended her conquests far beyond the limits of the Roman Empire. It was her blood that procured her both the peace she enjoyed under the Christian, and the victory she gained over the Pagan Emperors. So that as she had to shed her blood for the propagation of her teaching, she had also to bleed in order to make her authority accepted. The discipline, therefore, as well as the faith of the Church, was to have its Martyrs.'

Hence it was that St. Thomas, and the rest of the Martyrs for ecclesiastical liberty, never once stopped to consider how it was possible, with such weak means as were at their disposal, to oppose the invaders of the rights of the Church. One great element of Martyrdom is simplicity united with courage; and this explains how there have been Martyrs amongst the lowest classes of the faithful, and that young girls, and even children, can show their rich palm-branch. God has put into the heart of a Christian a capability of humble and inflexible resistance which makes every opposition give way. What, then, must that fidelity be, which the Holy Ghost has put into the souls of Bishops, whom he has constituted the Spouses of His Church, and the defenders of His beloved Jerusalem? 'St. Thomas,' says Bossuet, 'yields not to injustice, under the pretext that it is armed with the sword, and that it is a King who commits it; on the contrary, seeing that its source is high up, he feels his obligation of resisting it to be the greater, just as men throw the embankments higher when the torrent swells.'

But the Pastor may lose his life in the contest! Yes, it may be so: he may possibly have this glorious privilege. Our Lord came into this world to fight against it and conquer it; but He shed His Blood in the contest, He died on a Cross. So likewise were the Martyrs put to death. Can the Church, then, which was founded by the Precious Blood of her Divine Master, and was established by the blood of the Martyrs-----can she ever do without the saving laver of blood, which reanimates her with vigour, and vests her with the rich crimson of her royalty? St. Thomas understood this: and when we remember how he laboured to mortify his flesh by a life of penance, and how every sort of privation and adversity had taught him to crucify to this world every affection of his heart, we cannot be surprised at his possessing, within his soul, the qualities which fit a man for Martyrdom-----calmness of courage, and a patience proof against every trial. In other words, he had received from God the Spirit of Fortitude, and he faithfully corresponded to it.
 
'In the language of the Church,' continues Bossuet, 'fortitude has not the meaning it has in the language of the world. Fortitude, as the world understands it, is undertaking great things; according to the Church, it goes not beyond suffering every sort of trial, and there it stops. Listen to the words of St. Paul: Ye have not yet resisted unto blood; as though he would say: "You have not yet gone the whole length of your duty, because you have not resisted your enemies unto blood." He does not say, "You have not attacked your enemies and shed their blood;" but, "Your resistance to your enemies has not yet cost you your blood."

'These are the high principles of St. Thomas; but see how he makes use of them. He arms himself with this sword of the Apostle's teaching, not to make a parade of courage, and gain a name for heroism, but simply because the Church is threatened, and he must hold over her the shield of his resistance. The strength of the holy Archbishop lies not in any way either in the interference of sympathizers, or in a plot ably conducted. He has but to publish the sufferings he has so patiently borne, and odium will fall upon his persecutor: certain secret springs need only to be touched by such a man as this, and the people would be roused to indignation against the King! But the Saint scorns both plans. All he has on his side is the prayer of the poor, and the sighs of the widow and the orphan: these, as St. Ambrose would say, these are the Bishop's defenders, these his guard, these his army! He is powerful, because he has a soul that knows not either how to fear or how to murmur. He can in all truth say to Henry, King of England, what Tertullian said in the name of the whole Church to a magistrate of the Roman Empire, who was a cruel persecutor of the Church: We neither frighten thee nor fear thee: [Non te terremus, qui nec timemus.] we Christians are neither dangerous men, nor cowards; not dangerous, because we cannot cabal, and not cowards, because we fear not the sword.'

Our panegyrist proceeds to describe the victory won for the Church by her intrepid Martyr of Canterbury. We can scarcely be surprised when we are told that during the very year in which he preached this eloquent Sermon, Bossuet was raised to the episcopal dignity. We need offer no apology for giving the following fine passage.

'Christians! give me your attention. If there ever were a Martyrdom, which bore a resemblance to a sacrifice, it was the one I have to describe to you. First of all there is the preparation: the Bishop is in the Church with his ministers, and all are robed in the sacred vestments. And the victim? The victim is near at hand-----the Bishop is the victim chosen by God, and he is ready. So that all is prepared for the sacrifice, and they that are to strike the blow enter the Church. The holy man walks before them, as Jesus did before his enemies. He forbids his clergy to make the slightest resistance, and all he asks of his enemies is that they injure none of them that are present: it is the close imitation of his Divine Master, Who said to them that apprehended Him: If it be I Whom you seek, suffer these to go their way. And when all this had been done, and the moment for the sacrifice was come, St. Thomas begins the ceremony. He is both victim and priest: he bows down his head, and offers the prayer. Listen to the solemn prayer, and the mystical words of the sacrifice: And I am ready to die for God, and for the claims of justice, and for the liberty of the Church, if only she may gain peace and liberty by this shedding of my blood! [Et ego pro Deo mori paratus sum, et pro assertione justitiæ, et pro Ecclesie libertate; dummodo effusione sanguinis mei pacem et libertatem consequatur!] He prostrates himself before God: and as in the Holy Sacrifice there is the invocation of the Saints our intercessors, Thomas omits not so important a ceremony; he beseeches the holy Martyrs and the Blessed Mary ever a Virgin to deliver the Church from oppression. He can pray for nothing but the Church; his heart beats but for the Church; his lips can speak nothing but the Church; and when the blow has been struck, his cold and lifeless tongue seems still to be saying: The Church!'

Thus did our glorious Martyr, the type of a Bishop of the Church, consummate his sacrifice, thus did he gain his victory; and his victory will produce the total abolition of the sinful laws which would have made the Church the creature of the State, and an object of contempt to the people. The tomb of the Saint will become an altar; and at the foot of that altar, there will one day kneel a penitent King, humbly praying for pardon and blessing. What has wrought this change? Has the death of Thomas of Canterbury stirred up the people to revolt? Has his Martyrdom found its avengers? No. It is the blood of one who died for Christ producing its fruit. The world is hard to teach, else it would have long since learned this truth, that a Christian people can never see with indifference a pastor put to death for fidelity to his charge; and that a government that dares to make a Martyr will pay dearly for the crime. Modern diplomacy has learned the secret; experience has given it the instinctive craft of waging war against the liberty of the Church with less violence and more intrigue-----the intrigue of enslaving her by political administration. It was this crafty diplomacy which forged the chains wherewith so many churches are now shackled, and which, be they ever so gilded, are insupportable. There is but one way to unlink such fetters-----to break them. He that breaks them will be great in the Church of Heaven and earth, for he must be a Martyr: he will not have to fight with the sword, or be a political agitator, but simply to resist the plotters against the liberty of the Spouse of Christ, and suffer patiently whatever may be said or done against him.

Let us give ear once more to the sublime panegyrist of our St. Thomas: he is alluding to this patient resistance which made the Archbishop triumph over tyranny.

'My brethren, see what manner of men the Church finds rising up to defend her in her weakness, and how truly she may say with the Apostle: When I am weak, then am I powerful. [2 Cor. xii. 10.] It is this blessed weakness which provides her with invincible power, and enlists in her cause the bravest soldiers and the mightiest conquerors this world has ever seen-----the Martyrs. He that infringes on the authority of the Church, let him dread that precious blood of the Martyrs which consecrates and protects it.'

Now all this fortitude, and the whole of this victory, came from the Crib of the Infant Jesus: therefore it is that we find St. Thomas standing near it, in company with the Protomartyr Stephen. Any example of humility, and of what the world calls poverty and weakness, which had been less eloquent than this of the mystery of God made a little Child, would have been insufficient to teach man what real power is. Up to that time, man had no other idea of power than that which the sword can give, or of greatness than that which comes of riches, or of joy than such as triumph brings: but when God came into this world, and showed Himself weak and poor and persecuted, everything was changed. Men were found who loved the lowly Crib of Jesus, with all its humiliations, better than the whole world besides: and from this mystery of the weakness of an Infant God they imbibed a greatness of soul which even the world could not help admiring.

It is most just, therefore, that the two laurel-wreaths of St. Thomas and St. Stephen should intertwine round the Crib of the Babe of Bethlehem, for they are the two trophies of his two dear Martyrs. As regards St. Thomas, Divine Providence marked out most clearly the place he was to occupy in the cycle of the Christian year, by permitting his Martyrdom to happen on the day following the Feast of the Holy Innocents; so that the Church could have no hesitation in assigning December 29 as the day for celebrating the memory of the saintly Archbishop of Canterbury. As long as the world lasts, this day will be a feast of dearest interest to the whole Church of God; and the name of Thomas of Canterbury will be, to the day of judgment, terrible to the enemies of the liberty of the Church, and music breathing hope and consolation to hearts that love that liberty, which Jesus bought at the price of His Precious Blood.


Taken from THE LITURGICAL YEAR, Dom Guéranger, O.S.B., Book II.