St. Thomas More

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

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In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

“To you, my friends, I say,” we’re told in St. Luke, “do not be afraid of those who kill the body, and after that can do no more. I will tell you whom to fear: fear him who, after he is killed, has the power to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, he is the one to fear!” (Luke 12:4-5).

Today is the feast of St. Thomas More. In 1935, St. Thomas More and John Fisher were the first Englishmen to be declared saints since the Reformation.

His story is well known. At the height of his career he was one of the most successful and respected statesmen in the court of King Henry VIII. He was renowned for his wisdom, his wit, and his scrupulous honesty as a lawyer and as a judge.

He fell from favor when he was unable to support Henry in the matter of the annulment of the King's marriage to his wife, Catherine of Aragon, so that Henry could marry Anne Boleyn.

Perhaps of greater concern to More was the King's actions in setting up a new English church with himself as the head, supplanting the authority of the Pope.

Initially, Henry protected his close friend, choosing not to include him in the legal and canonical process of his divorce, because he respected More's integrity and had no wish to cause him harm.

But with the passage of time, it became very difficult that such an eminent and influential man could be left out of the controversy which had gripped the whole of Europe as well as England.

Eventually, Henry realized that he needed the weight of More's reputation to support his case.

Thomas More's conscience would not permit him to agree with the dissolution of the marriage, or with the new Oath of Supremacy to Henry as head of the Church of England, which repudiated the Pope's authority in the realm.

Thomas More was imprisoned in the Tower of London, and to widespread shock and international disapproval, Henry signed his death warrant. Thomas More was executed on Tower Green on July 6th, 1535.

He was famous as a great statesman, but in the early years of his public life, Thomas More was by no means wealthy. He was a young lawyer, member of Parliament, looking to make his way in the world.

He had among his wide circle of acquaintances among the most learned men in Europe. In the early years, he often traveled abroad to share ideas with people such as Erasmus of Rotterdam.

Thomas wore a rough undergarment, a hair shirt made from horse or goat hair, designed to inflict discomfort on the wearer as an ever-present reminder of the sufferings of Christ. It was worn under the usual external clothing and so would not have been visible to anyone else.

He also had a small gold and enameled crucifix, which he wore as an additional act of penance. It would have been worn underneath his hair shirt.

The cross had a small container which would have held a relic, and the cross itself had sharp spikes, which would have been designed to press into the skin and inflict pain.

Like the hair shirt, this was intended to be a constant reminder of the pain suffered by Christ on the Cross, and an encouragement to the wearer to avoid temptation to sin, and to maintain an active prayer life.

The testimonies of people about the life of Thomas More are particularly moving. Privately, many individuals recognize the greatness of Thomas More.

John Donne, a famous English poet, described him as “a man of the most tender and delicate conscience that the world has seen since St. Augustine” (John Donne, Biathanatos).

Jonathan Swift, an Anglican clergyman not known for his flattery, characterized him as “a person of the greatest virtue this kingdom has ever produced” (Jonathan Swift, Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I).

Let's ponder those words for a moment: an Anglican clergyman describing Thomas More as the person of the greatest virtue that the whole of the United Kingdom has ever produced in the whole of its history.

In the world of law and government, Thomas More became “a symbol of integrity” (Jubilee of Government Leaders, Members of Parliament and Politicians, Proclamation of St. Thomas More as Patron of Statesmen, October 26, 2000).

In family life and professional life, he became a symbol of balance, serenity, and of cheerfulness, and for people in every walk of life, he became a “portrait of courage” (Gerard Wegemer, Thomas More).

This feast day also reminds us of the Catholic persecution in England of the Catholic English martyrs. It's a very glorious story, not one that has been told very much—it’s well worth your while reading about the English martyrs.

These weeks and months there is an exhibition taking place in the British Museum, and also in Hampton Court, a palace in London, of some of the relics of the English martyrs, many of them held in Stonyhurst College in Liverpool, a Jesuit College dating back 500 years, which itself has a glorious history, born during the time of the greatest persecution of Catholics in England.

We can invoke Thomas More for courage, for integrity, for our lay mentality, for the apostolate that God wants us to carry out in the middle of the world, particularly in our professional environment.

We're told also in St. Luke, “Can you not buy five sparrows for two pennies? And yet not one is forgotten in God's sight. Every hair on your head has been counted. There is no need to be afraid: you are worth more than many sparrows” (Luke 12:6-7).

Thomas More was very aware of his own inadequacy, of his own humanity. His famous phrase—he said, “This is not the stuff of which martyrs are made” (Highland Films, A Man for All Seasons).

But yet God had other plans. He was aware of his nothingness, but he was also aware that he was carried in the palm of a hand of a God who loves him.

He wasn't afraid to be a conscientious objector. The role of Christians in the world is becoming more and more important in law, medicine, politics, buying, and selling. The world is very much in need of the Christian and heroic witness that Thomas More gave.

“I tell you, if anyone openly declares himself for me in the presence of human beings, the Son of man will declare himself for him in the presence of God's angels. But anyone who disowns me in the presence of human beings will be disowned in the presence of God's angels” (Luke 12:8-9).

Thomas More clashed with his environment and wasn't afraid to do so. He brought great virtue to his professional life. He wasn't afraid of not being understood by his peers. He followed his informed conscience.

He gives us a great example to all professional people of always keeping our hands clean, and always above the table, because God sees everything.

Someday we will have to give an account to God for every single decision, for every single action.

God wants us to give a great witness of truth, of beauty, and of love, to show people with our words and with our actions what our faith and faith in God is all about.

Through practicing all these virtues, Thomas More became a saint in the ordinary circumstances of his professional life, seeing the challenges and the crosses that God permitted in his life as the means to his holiness.

“So we are ambassadors for Christ” says St. Paul. “It is as though God were urging you through us. and in the name of Christ, we appeal to you to be reconciled to God” (2 Cor. 5:20). It's a rather beautiful term: “ambassadors for Christ.”

An ambassador is somebody who doesn't act in their name. They're usually very select, chosen people, people of high talent. They represent their government 24/7.

Everything they do reflects their ambassadorial role. They're called to give honor to their country, to be very loyal citizens.

All these things were embodied in the life of Thomas More. Great lay mentality, great naturalness and ordinariness. He gives us a great example of the enormous ways that God uses our heroic witness on a daily basis to change the world.

God has placed each one of us with our vocation where we are, with our job, in this home, as this father or mother of a family. This is where God wants us to carry out our mission and our apostolate.

Very much tied up with the great heroic witness in his professional life was the rich family life of Thomas More. He was a very good family man.

St. Josemaría Escrivá appointed him as an intercessor in the whole of the Prelature of Opus Dei for relations with civil authorities.

We entrust to him the care of any matters that have to do with civil authorities, like land development for apostolic purposes, juridical approval of different entities, curricula for schools and universities, passports, visas.

St. Josemaría could have chosen any number of saints. He vacillated between St. Thomas More and St. Vincent Ferrer, who was a Spanish Dominican. Someone asked once, Why did a Spanish priest choose an English lawyer as an intercessor for Opus Dei?

When we look at and read the life of Thomas More, we get some of the answers—his heroic virtue as an ordinary layman in the middle of the world, as a professional man of the utmost integrity, a person with a great lay mentality.

He said, “I die the king's good servant, but God's first” (British History Online, Henry VIII: July 1535, 1-10, Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic). An exemplary citizen.

He's a patron saint of politicians and statesmen, and also lawyers. He can teach us to love the world in which God has placed us, with all of its iniquity and hypocrisy and evil and double-dealings. All those things existed in the time of Thomas More. He came face to face with all the weaknesses of human nature.

We can't be scandalized by anything we see or hear in the world or in the Church. There was only one bishop in England that took the same stance as Thomas More.

It reminds us that we are called to heroic sanctity, irrespective of the circumstances.

We can invoke him for all the things that we need, to think the way that he did, to see the world as being good. We need to have a healthy love for the good things in the world because we see God in them.

“There is something…divine hidden in the most ordinary human situations, and it is up to each one of us to discover it” (J. Escrivá, Conversations, Point 114).

We also need to have a good knowledge of our faith, doctrine, of natural law, to inform our conscience, so that our conscience can make good decisions.

Often, we hear a lot about the word “feeling.” ‘I feel this is right, I feel that is right.’ We don't function on feelings. We function with reason enlightened by faith.

Somebody told a story once of four people who were drinking Coca-Cola. They all believed and really felt in their heart and soul and minds they were drinking Coca-Cola.

But the last person, the fourth person, their Coca-Cola was laced with cyanide. And so, even though all of them very sincerely believed in their heart and soul that they were drinking Coca-Cola, all you can say is that that fourth person, whose Coke was laced with cyanide, was that in a few minutes, he will be very sincerely dead.

So, it's not enough just to follow what we very sincerely believe to be right, what we feel to be right. We have to know reason enlightened by faith.

We have to be ready to follow what is right, no matter what is going to happen, even if the ceiling is going to fall down on top of us, even if we have to leave our profession, have to put ourselves out in the streets, and abandon ourselves to the hands of God.

One key principle in our life is not to do anything that is wrong. Thomas More gives us a great example, to every single citizen of every country, never to do anything that is wrong, because someday we want to be called to the eternal wedding feast.

We want God to be able to say to us, “Well done, good and faithful servant. Because you have been faithful in little things, I will set you over many” (Matt. 25:23).

We're told in the Book of Genesis that God saw all things and “He saw that they were good” (Gen. 1:31). And so, the world is our place.

The vocation of the layman is to order the temporal realities to the best of their ability. Thomas More did everything he could.

He couldn't change the world, but he changed that little bit of the world that was around him. He saw that this was his place.

We don't run away from the problems of the world. We're called to be a good worker, to work with confidence, to develop prestige, to be a leader, to illuminate the world with doctrine.

Thomas More acquired that prestige. He was a real leader.

Blessed Álvaro del Portillo said in a letter in January 1993: “In recent years, I've often reminded you that to disappear like leaven or like salt does not mean blending into the background.

“Naturalness means behaving like Christians, which is what we are, and not being afraid of clashing with the pagan atmosphere of our surroundings. I feel compelled to emphasize this idea and to remind you of the apostle's warning to the first Christians.”

Thomas More didn't blend into the background. He used every bit of prestige and power and the platform that God had given him to proclaim with words and with his actions what was right, to give witness. He wasn't afraid of clashing with his surroundings.

Blessed Álvaro continues, “We find, in any upright activity, the raw material for our sanctity and the field for our apostolate—an apparent wasteland that is rendered fertile by heaven's grace when we cultivate it with the means God has marked out for us.

“First, our friendship and confidence are the key to true effectiveness in our apostolate, which enables us to enkindle other hearts with the love of God burning in our own.”

Part of the great influence that Thomas More had was because of his prestige. Each one of us is called to acquire prestige.

Prestige doesn't necessarily come from people who are very intelligent. Sometimes people who are very intelligent can also be very lazy. They may not use their intelligence well. Intelligence doesn't necessarily bring prestige.

What's much more effective in cultivating prestige is work well done—somebody who's a hard worker, who finishes things well, who gives a good service.

To develop prestige is within the possibilities of each one of us. It’s sort of an obligation, and from that position of prestige we can illuminate the world.

I heard a story once of a man who was a very prestigious economist in a certain country, and that country was rewriting the Constitution.

As the top economist in the country, that person was invited to be part of a 35-person panel that was drafting the new Constitution.

It was an uneven number in case of a tied vote and his surname began with a V. So he was at the very end of the voting process.

They were voting on a certain term to put into the Constitution. One of the terms that was suggested was to talk about “the greatest good for the greatest majority.” The other possibility was the term “the common good.”

Now “the greatest good for the greatest majority” sounds very attractive. It sounds very just. But the problem is, what happens then with the minorities?

Whereas the concept of “the common good,” a very Thomistic and Aristotelian concept, refers to the well-being of each individual person; no matter who they are, or where they came from, what religion they have, every single person is important.

This was debated long and hard and then there was a vote called. But before the vote, people were speaking in favor of one idea or the other.

There was a Muslim speaker there who was part of this committee, representing the Muslim community, and that Muslim man was in favor of the idea of “the greatest good for the greatest majority.”

But this economist stood up and said, “Your Honor, with all due respect, if we insert the concept of ‘the greatest good for the greatest majority’ to our constitution, and if the majority of the Catholics in this country, which are a majority of people in the country—if they vote to kill all the Muslims, then constitutionally, that would be OK.”

So the Muslim representative had to back down and say, “OK, I vote for ‘the common good.’ It's a much fairer, better reflection of the dignity and the rights of every human person.”

And so, that concept was inserted into the Constitution. It was a very good example of how the voice of that particular layman with formation, with his prestige, was able to have a vast influence in the formation of the Constitution of that country and to insert Christian principles there.

Blessed Álvaro says, “Therefore, my daughters and sons, we need drive, initiative. God counts on our personal freedom and responsibility and our lay mentality. He wants us to be salt, dispersed through the food it seasons, and not to remain a solid lump. He wants us everywhere, each one in his or her place, so as to impart a Christian flavor to the environment in which we move” (A. del Portillo, Pastoral Letter, January 9, 1993).

You can say that Thomas More certainly imparted that Christian flavor. It's a Christian flavor that has come down to us through the centuries. The wonderful example that he's left us—he's blazed a trail.

He says, “Be convinced of the importance of exercising your personal freedom, which brings with it a corresponding personal responsibility to get involved in national and international bodies, which can be a platform for promoting Christian values regarding the family, education, the defense of life, and many other issues which have to be approached in accordance with the Church's teachings.

“If your work has anything to do with media, press, or television, just imagine the apostolic impact it will have if, as it performs its informative and cultural roles, it also bears the stamp of your unity of life.”

It’s as though St. Thomas More tried to live out these principles to a very high degree. He had a great unity of life; there was a great blend between what he believed in and how he lived.

The Second Vatican Council has said one of the greatest errors of our time is the separation between faith and life (cf. Vatican II, Gaudium et spes, December 7, 1965).

The Sunday Mass-going Catholic, whose faith does not influence their life or their work for the rest of the week—we have to try and change that reality, help people to live a blended union between their spiritual life and their ordinary family or professional life, so that we're Christians 100 percent in every situation, in every decision.

In the 1980s, there was a presidential candidate in the United States called Geraldine Ferraro, I think, in California, and she was nominally Catholic. She said she was against abortion in her private life, but when she went into the political arena, she said, “I can't impose my views on other people.”

Very quickly, the Cardinal Archbishop of New York at the time, Cardinal John O'Connor, spoke out and said, “That's not acceptable. You can't take off your Catholic hat when you go into the political arena, or your Christian hat. You can't be a two-faced person—one person one minute and another person the next minute.

“You bring your values wherever you go. You bring your Christianity and your Catholicism. You can't be a Catholic one minute and a barbarian another minute. Destroying human life is completely unacceptable.”

If we look around us, we might see examples of that sort of unity of life very common in the world. Thomas More can be a great patron saint of unity of life.

“Be anxious,” he says, “to draw the people around you closer to God. Try to help them all. But bear in mind, those who are most in need are the ones who have received ten talents, since their responsibility is greater, and God expects more from them.”

One of the interesting aspects of St. Thomas More is that he himself, and the environment around him, were very much at the apex of society, the top of the pyramid.

He was dealing with people who were to shape the whole of the country for many centuries. His influence was enormous.

It's a message to us that we also have to see, How can I influence people who are the major decision-makers—people at the top of my profession, people with prestige—so that they can become fishers of men?

St. Josemaría used to say, “If you pour water on the top of a pyramid, it will reach the bottom of the pyramid. If you pour water on the bottom of the pyramid, it may never reach the top.”

He said, “Apostolate with the people who are leaders in society at the top of their profession is like the snow on the mountain peaks. As it melts, it makes the valleys fertile.”

We can examine our conscience and see, Am I dealing with leaders, with people of influence, people with prestige?

I might not be that sort of person myself, but God has given each one of us the grace to have the ear of such people, so that like Thomas More, we can find a way to influence whatever possibilities God has given to us.

We have a great responsibility as an ordinary citizen to do good, to influence, to vote, to bring about just laws, and to vote for them. “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's” (Mark 12:17).

In The Forge, St. Josemaría says, “You are an ordinary citizen. It is precisely because of that secularity of yours, which is the same as, and neither more nor less than, that of your colleagues, that you have to be sufficiently brave—which may sometimes mean being very brave—to make your faith felt. They should see your good works and the motive that drives you to do them” (J. Escrivá, The Forge, Point 723).

It may be that a medical student has to refuse to take part in any type of abortion that may be part of the curriculum. And he might be the only person in the whole class doing so, but he may give a great example to his colleagues of what is right.

The same with a young lawyer or somebody in politics—take a lot of virtue. But that's our Christian calling.

He says in the Furrow, “It is difficult to make one’s mark through quiet work and the proper fulfillment of our duties as citizens, so that later one can demand one's rights and place them in the service of the Church and of society. It is difficult…but it is very effective” (J. Escrivá, Furrow, Point 300).

We have to know how to demand our rights. St. Paul demanded his rights (1 Cor. 9: 1-18). Our right to the truth. Our right to conscience. Our right to conscientious objection. Our right to do what is right.

Nowhere in the Gospel does it say we have the right to do evil, and sometimes we have to call evil by its name.

“Each member of the lay faithful,” said a document called Christifideles laici-Decree on the Vocation and Mission of the Lay Faithful (Apostolate of the Lay People), “should always be fully aware of being a ‘member of the Church’ yet entrusted with a unique task which cannot be done by another and which is to be fulfilled for the good of all…the absolute necessity of an apostolate exercised by the individual” (John Paul II, Apostolic Exhortation, Christifideles laici, December 30, 1988).

“The apostolate exercised by the individual—which flows abundantly from a truly Christian life (cf. John 4:14)—is the origin and condition of the whole lay apostolate…

“Regardless of circumstance, all lay persons (including those who have no opportunity or possibility for collaboration in associations) are called to this type of apostolate and obliged to engage in it.

“Such an apostolate is useful at all times and places, but in certain circumstances it is the only one available and feasible” (Pope Paul VI and Vatican II, Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity, Apostlican Actuositatem, November 18, 1965).

The apostolate of Thomas More was in many ways the only one available and feasible at the time.

He played his role in the evangelization of culture. He showed a great loyalty to the Church, to the Pope, to the state, to his wife, and to his children. He didn't give in in matters of faith and morals. He respected the opinions of others.

St. Josemaría liked to say that in areas of education and marriage, as Christians in the middle of the world, we have to fight all the way in terms of laws, of curricula in schools, of the Internet, of television, of movies, of everything that influences society, so that we help people to form their conscience, and therefore they can have an informed conscience.

Our Lady must have been very happy when she saw the courage, the virtue, the loyalty of Thomas More.

Mary, may you help us to follow his example in each of the professions where you have placed us.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

GD