LONDON (RNS) — King Henry VIII and his iconoclast-in-chief, Thomas Cromwell, would be stunned: Nearly 500 years after the English Reformation, Canterbury Cathedral, the mother church of the Protestant Church of England, will be given over to a Roman Catholic Mass, celebrated by the pope’s own representative in the country in honor of the martyr Thomas Becket, who died in the cathedral in 1170.
Not least among the historical oddities of the day will be that the Mass will award those in attendance a plenary indulgence.
When Henry broke with Rome in 1535 to create the Church of England, it led to the destruction of shrines to saints and martyrs, including their relics. The tradition of offering pilgrims an indulgence for visiting these shrines — a key driver of the Protestant revolt across Europe at the time — was ended.
But on Monday (July 7), Canterbury Cathedral will reverse that history when a Mass is celebrated by Archbishop Miguel Maury Buendia, apostolic nuncio to the United Kingdom, to mark one of the feasts of Becket, the former Archbishop of Canterbury murdered by knights acting for another English king, Henry II. After a repentant Henry II paid a public penance the following year, Becket was made a saint in 1173, and Canterbury quickly become a place of pilgrimage.
The feast, known as the translation of …