Anglo-Catholics want Becket as Ordinariate patron

By Anthony Barich
AUSTRALIAN Anglo-Catholics want 12th century English martyr St Thomas Becket as the patron of their Ordinariate.

Becket was martyred in his Cathedral as Archbishop of Canterbury, having vexed King Henry II by excommunicating the Bishops of London and Salisbury for their support of the King, with whom Becket disagreed on changes to law regarding Church and Crown courts, among other things.
Australian Anglo-Catholics believe adopting Becket as their patron is apt, considering how they say they have been ostracised by the Anglican Church.
St Thomas Becket is immortalised in Canterbury Cathedral, which hosts one of the four great mediaeval shrines of the Church.
The others are the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, Santiago de Compostela (the remains of St James the Apostle) in Spain and Our Lady of Walsingham in England.
His burial place was destroyed during the Reformation in seven stages. Archbishop John Hepworth said that by the time King Henry VIII’s chief minister Thomas Cromwell, who history shows was anti-Christian, came to finish off the relic there was only the right hand left – the blessing hand.
It was smuggled across the channel to a Catholic monastery in Normandy, France where it survived the French revolution and was greatly venerated. When Anglicans enjoyed the first modern visit of a Pope to Canterbury Cathedral in 1982, Pope John Paul II promised to send the hand back to Canterbury.
The monastery didn’t want to send it to the English, Archbishop Hepworth said, so they sent it to Rome where 12 slivers of bone were taken, including the one placed on the altar during Mass at Holy Family Como Catholic Parish on 26 February.
It is an authentic relic of the surviving hand. The rest of the hand is now in a shrine in the Catholic church alongside Canterbury Cathedral, and is still an important place of pilgrimage for English Catholics.
It was also on the altar during Mass at the Anglo-Catholics’ 1-3 February national conference on the Gold Coast.