Proclamation on 850th Anniversary of the Martyrdom of Saint Thomas Becket
(www.whitehouse.gov)
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The "government" of Rome, the Vatican...was kinda fucking with British people. Making it so that only the church could punish the clergy. How is this about religious freedom?
Yes, but don't you wish we had a church power that could check the government at this point? Americans spent the last 20 years demonizing the church to where they hold no clout, so now the government can just do whatever it wants. It sure would be easy to organize resistance to some of these bullshit coronavirus edicts if we all met every other sunday.
No I don't really want my church to have the power to hold in-house trials for it's members, to shield them from prosecution on behalf of a political entity in Rome.
God has plenty of power for his church. Aside from staying out of our service etc, I don't think we should be able to usurp laws against murder by "defrocking" the guilty.
It was all political back then. It was barely even about faith. These guys were just fighting for control over Britain.
People forget the power the Pope had back then.
Kings derived their claims of power due to being 'appointed by God'. So if you defied the Pope, he could excommunicate you - removing your claim to the throne, and expressly encouraging revolution and invasion.
These tussles between crown and Rome were never about religion, but power. Becket didn't deserve to be murdered, but at the same time he was defending the principle of Roman supremacy over British laws.
He wasn't an icon of freedom. Just because he was a victim of tyranny doesn't mean he wasn't a proponent of a competing form of tyranny.
The process of limiting the political power of the church is as noble as that of limiting the power of kings. Look at Iran for what can happen otherwise.
Would anyone here really want the current Pope to effectively have power over Trump? The ability to greenlight the US military to oust him, and handpick his own successor?
Because that's what Becket stood for.