Essays in Idleness

Awakening from an extravagant dream this morning, I found a new collective noun in my head. It was, “an affliction of bishops.” The dream, gentle reader will surmise, was something about synods.

We have survived much through the last twenty centuries or so. We will survive more.

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To Mass, and the celebration today of Saint Anselm, among the greatest Archbishops of Canterbury, along with Augustine the original “Apostle to the English,” and of course the assassinated Thomas à Becket. (All Romans, and two of them Italian.)

Anselm was everything we seek in a bishop, though seldom get, because we do not pray hard enough. He was a man of deep learning, a philosophical and theological genius, a talented administrator, a simple pastor, and an obvious saint. He had also the guts to stand up to kings, and was twice exiled from England for his rock-like opposition to legislative depravities we’d think nothing of today. Twice, too, he was restored to office, because he was too large to ignore.

For it wasn’t just Henry the VIIIth. Previous English kings had tried their luck, in appropriating to themselves what belonged to Christ and His Church, only.

“Nothing in this earth is dearer to Christ,” Anselm said, “than the freedom of His Church.”

Let no Christian forget that, in this world that swelters from political arrogance. Saint Anselm of Canterbury pray for us.