You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints.

This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute, an apostolate helping Catholics understand, live, and share their faith.

I'm Christopher Bloom, a professor in the Augustine Institute's Graduate School of Theology,

and I'm very happy to be with you on the Feast of St. Thomas Beckett.

It's such an astonishing thing, isn't it, that the church offers us the feast days of martyrs during the Christmas octave.

It reminds us that Christ came among us on a rescue mission for the human race.

He came among us to save us from our sins, knowing that he would die to pay the price for Adam's fault and our faults.

So here we are thinking about a martyr.

And not just any martyr, but a martyr relatively close to us, the 12th century in England,

not way back at the time of the Roman Empire.

And also a martyr who's killed in a way that maybe should trouble us a little bit more than it does.

You know, I think we're accustomed to thinking about martyrs who are being made in the context of

of ideologies and revolutions and wars. Think of the martyrs of the Spanish Civil War or the martyrs of the French Revolution.

But here's a man who's killed essentially by his king at a time of peace in the context of

a political dispute and a political dispute in which it's really hard for us to appreciate just what was at stake.

How did Thomas Beckett come to die?

In his play dramatizing the last days of Thomas Beckett, murder in the cathedral, T.S. Eliot,

the great poet laureate in England, Anglo-American,

who was writing in the first half of the 20th century,

has his character, Thomas Beckett, say,

martyrs do not choose martyrdom.

Martyrs choose the will of God.

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