The first four days of Christmas draw directly from biblical events: the Nativity, St. Stephen’s martyrdom, St. John’s life, and the tragic Massacre of the Innocents.

This year, the Fifth Day of Christmas maintains that theme with the Feast of the Holy Family. However, we will discuss that moveable feast tomorrow—all will be explained—and instead focus on December 29’s other celebration, which transports us to 12th-century England with the Feast of St. Thomas Becket.

St. Thomas was a favorite of King Henry II, enjoying a life of at least relative luxury. According to most accounts, he owed his appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury to this royal patronage. But while many once-good men are changed for the worse by power, St. Thomas appears to have been a flawed man transformed for the better by the weight of his new responsibilities. He dedicated himself to prayer and study—and denied the frustrated monarch’s attempts to control the Church through his former crony.

The tension between St. Thomas and Henry escalated when the King circumvented him as the archbishop, having other bishops perform a coronation without his approval. St. Thomas, asserting the independence of the Church, excommunicated these clerics. Infuriated, the King exclaimed within earshot of several loyal knights, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?”

MARTYRDOM.

Four of Henry’s knights, reading between the lines, traveled to Canterbury to take St. Thomas into custody. They confronted him in the cathedral during the evening Vespers service and demanded the “traitor to the king” show himself. St. Thomas, hidden behind a pillar, chose at this moment to put his faith before his life, stepping out in plain sight and affirming that his duty to his faith came before his loyalty to the crown.

The knights fell upon the archbishop, and he determined to meet his end with dignity: “For the name of Jesus and the protection of the Church, I am ready to embrace death,” he said as they dashed his brains across the consecrated ground.

St. Thomas was almost immediately recognized by his parishioners as a martyr to the faith. The King himself appears to have been deeply moved—and terrified—by St. Thomas’s sacrifice, taking personal blame for the slaying and fasting barefoot before the clergyman’s tomb in penance.