6 December, Follow that star IV: do they still believe?

Here is Saint Nicholas, ‘of this church the patron’ according to the Latin inscription at the foot of the window. The saint is holding a model of ‘this church’, Saint Nicholas’ at Barfrestone near Dover in Kent, a tiny gem of the 11th or 12th Century.

Notice, too, his impressive beard, as good as any department store Santa, who of course is a distant descendant of the generous Saint Nicholas.

The three discs repeated on his mitre (or bishop’s headdress) and his cope (or robe) stand for gold coins which Nicholas tossed into the chimney of a home where three daughters were too poor to get married. The story of the boys in the tub tells that the saint restored them to life after a butcher had killed and pickled them.

These stories are not to be believed as historically factual but they show that Nicholas was a conscientious bishop and well aware of the needs of children and families, a fitting patron of children. But do we want children to believe in Father Christmas? A man who comes down the chimney with presents for reportedly ‘good children’?

GK Chesterton explored this question in a 1935 article for the National Catholic Reporter, ‘Santa Claus and Science: On imagination, faith, and the natural fancy of children’. Here is an extract; read the whole essay by following the link below.

What do our great modern educationists, our great modern psychologists, our great makers of a new world, mean to do about the breach between the imagination and the reason, if only in the passage from the infant to the man? Is the child to live in a world that is entirely fanciful and then find suddenly that it is entirely false? Or is the child to be forbidden all forms of fancy; or in other words, forbidden to be a child? Or is he, as we say, to have some harmless borderland of fancy in childhood, which is still a part of the land in which he will live; in terra viventium, in the land of living men? Cannot the child pass from a child’s natural fancy to a man’s normal faith in Holy Nicholas of the Children, without enduring that bitter break and abrupt disappointment which now marks the passage of a child from a land of make-believe to a world of no belief.

7 July: The translation of Saint Thomas

The Crypt of Canterbury Cathedral.

In 1120, Thomas Becket was born in London; in 1170, he was murdered in his Cathedral. By the time his remains were translated (moved) to a new shrine in the cathedral, Canterbury had become a major pilgrimage destination and a place of healing. Perhaps relatively few of the healings recorded by the Benedictine custodians would be recognised as miracles today but those who were healed, whether by divine intervention or the workings of human psychology – mind over matter, if you will – went home rejoicing. Even King Henry II, whose tempestuous outburst spurred the four knights to confront and kill the Archbishop, came as a penitent pilgrim.

But in 1538 another king was angry. Henry VIII wanted a divorce from Catharine of Aragon, who had borne a daughter but no son. Unable to attack militarily the Pope who had refused the divorce, he divorced the Church of England from the Catholic church. Thomas, the low-born bishop who had stood up to the king was now, not a martyred saint but a traitor, whose name was to be forgotten, written out of history, even out of prayer books.

This Link is to a post from Magdalene College, Cambridge. It tells how this was done, using actual books in their libraries; a good read.