Opinion: Becket, Burton and Mahony

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As Kenneth Turan noted in The Times, Angelenos have until Thursday to catch a rare theatrical presentation of ‘Becket,’ the lush 1964 film about the ‘meddlesome priest’ who was martyred in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. Turan focuses on the fact that ‘Becket’ was a tony star vehicle for Richard Burton (as Becket) and Peter O’Toole. For me, the film is part of a personal trilogy of Catholic-themed films of the 1960s - the others being ‘The Cardinal’ and ‘Shoes of the Fisherman.’ Never before or since have so many actors donned the miter!

‘Becket’ is the best of the breed, not only because of the performances of Burton and O’Toole (parodied by John Candy and Joe Flaherty in SCTV’s ‘The Man Who Would Be King of the Popes’), but also because Burton as Becket incarnated an article of pre-Vatican II Catholic faith: that church trumps state. In the film’s most riveting scene, Becket excommunicates a priest-killer (and noble pal of the king’s) as a phalanx of hooded monks upend and snuff out their lighted candles.

It’s only a movie, but ‘Becket’ resonates in lot of contemporary clashes between church and state.

For example, I remember shaking my head in the early 1980s when opponents of U.S. involvement in Central America created the ‘sanctuary movement’ and housed Salvadoran refugees in churches. Their argument was that God’s house was as off-limits to INS agents as it was to the warring armies of the Middle Ages -- or the knights who committed sacrilege by seizing and murdering Becket in his cathedral.

There was certainly a whiff of Archbishop Becket’s defiance of worldy authority in Cardinal Roger Mahony’s warning last year that he would instruct his priests to defy proposed federal legislation that would require churches and other social organizations to ask immigrants for legal documentation before providing assistance. Liberals who ordinarily aren’t favorably disposed to what they like to call the all-male Catholic hierarchy warmed to Mahony’s Becket-like profile in courage because it was in a good cause. As one priest explained the church’s opposition to a crackdown on illegal immigrants: ‘This is not our law. We follow God’s law.’ (Imagine if Mahony excommunicated the Minutemen!)

It’s a peculiar paradox: neo-medieval notions of church and state in service of contemporary liberalism. But liberals (and most everyone else) were not so tolerant of the unwillingness of some Catholic bishops to tell civil authorities about priests who preyed on youngsters. Yet Thomas Becket insisted that ‘criminous clerks’ (clerks meaning clerics) be tried not in royal courts but in church tribunals. If Becket, and not Cardinal Bernard Law, had been archbishop of Boston, no molesting priest would have faced secular justice.

‘Becket’ is still a great film, and I guarantee that excommunication scene wil give you goose bumps. But we’re all better off that King Henry II, and not Thomas a Becket, had the last word about the proper relationship of God’s law and man’s law.