You would not be surprised, I suppose, that your legacy was largely forgotten for several hundred years in the church you loved following your death. To that bit of news, I imagine you quipping something to the effect that losing one’s head generally indicates a lack of popularity! Fortunately, the Catholic Church did eventually canonize you, though the event took place a full 400 years after your martyrdom.
You would surely be tickled to know that in 2010, the bishop of Rome—whose authority you so ardently defended by your writing and then by your silence—set foot in the very Westminster Hall where you were convicted of high treason. Quite early in his brilliant discourse, the Holy Father specifically invoked you as he reminded his listeners of the need for a “profound and ongoing dialogue” between “secular rationality and religious belief” in the political and legislative dimensions of society.16 The historical irony of Pope Benedict XVI standing on the same stones that heard your death sentence was at once so wondrous and strange that you surely would have commemorated it with a joke at your own expense, or perhaps an epigram on the value of patience. The papists may yet reclaim England!
Just a few years before your canonization in 1935, G. K. Chesterton, a fellow Englishman, wrote the following about you: “Blessed Thomas More is more important at this moment than at any moment since his death, even perhaps the great moment of his dying; but he is not quite so important as he will be in about a hundred years’ time.”17 In my experience of reading Chesterton, I find that I vehemently disagree with him after a first reading, consider him too much of a cute sophist to be taken seriously after a second, and entirely agree with him on the third.
But just why he is right regarding your importance to my own time is not easy to pinpoint. Your courageous stand for the truths of both “Rome and reason,” as Chesterton put it, is perhaps what he had foremost in mind.18 And indeed, Chesterton presciently foresaw the inevitable advance of “enlightened” thought entirely hostile to the Christian faith. This euphemistic phrase is a mere mask for an ideology manifesting itself in increasingly open and alarming ways. Several years ago, Pope Benedict XVI summed up this dominant way of thinking as “the dictatorship of relativism.”19 The obvious temptation for an admirer of your witness to the church and the natural law is to liken our generation to yours, and worry that such an end as you suffered is soon to befall us, even if the martyrdom be white rather than red.
Yet that line of interpretation glosses over, I think, the more profound gift you offer to the women and men of today. In a sense, I lament the manner in which you are remembered. Your joyful family life, the legendary education of your children, and your brilliant work which ushered in the Renaissance of letters have all been upstaged, and inevitably so, by your heroic witness of courage and conscience. I am certainly grateful, nevertheless, that such a witness is available to us, however costly it was to yourself and your country. I think the most precious inheritance Catholics can receive from you today, especially those under your patronage, is the manner in which you readied yourself for the supreme moment of your witness. Your prayer-prepared courage, generated and stored over the course of an immensely blessed life, is most beautifully portrayed in your meditations entitled The Sadness of Christ.
Your choice of Scripture to ponder at the end of your life is easy enough to understand. The thought of you poring over the sequence of Jesus’ agony in the garden, his betrayal, and the beginning of his trial while enduring an identical agony, bestows a great solemnity on your text. The beginning of Jesus’ passion narrative was the mirror in which you regarded your own passion, and I cannot imagine the loneliness you must have experienced as you entered into the same destiny as our Lord. How incredibly graced, though, is the good which came from both agonies—his to redeem the world from sin, yours to inspire generations until the resolution of that world’s woes and throes.
As you sat in your Tower of London cell, praying with the accounts of Jesus’ words and deeds in the garden of Gethsemane, you seem to have created for yourself a detailed examination of conscience. I picture you in the garden, pinching yourself to stay awake with Christ as he discourses privately with the Father. I see you keeping your eyes open at all costs, lest the Lord return to ask you, as he did Simon Peter, “Are you sleeping?” (Matt 26:45).
I cannot fathom the pressure you endured from your friends and family members, almost all of whom willingly made the oath, and many of whom, including your daughter Meg, pleaded with you to ignore the impediment of your conscience. They did not consider the oath to be the end of Catholicism in England or a violation of divine law as you did, but the sheer weight of their supplications buckled the resistance of virtually all other men of consequence in England. I have personally viewed the petition which your king, Henry VIII, sent to the Pope requesting a divorce so that he could marry Anne Boleyn. His petition was put on display in the Capitoline Museums during my studies in Rome. Attached to the brown parchment with eloquent script are the red seals of the great men of your day. By affixing their seals to this request, they affirmed the king’s right to the divorce, and later hailed him as head of the Church of England when he broke ranks with the Roman Pontiff. They were noblemen, members of Parliament, and bishops; you must have known most of them quite well. As I gazed upon that fateful piece of paper and the cracked seals, my mind turned to you and John Fisher, the only English bishop who refused to sign the oath and who, like yourself, laid down his life as a consequence.
Even at this most terrible occasion, you did not abandon your sense of humor. While providing for yourself an examination of conscience within your commentary on Jesus’ agony, you gently chide your readers not only for sluggishness and sleepiness in prayer, but also for a lackadaisical approach to the sovereign Lord of the universe. I distinctly recall reading your list of mindless distractions which we indulge during prayer. When I scanned the lines containing your rant against picking one’s nose while praying, I found my own finger scouring the inner sanctum of a nostril, more attuned to the discovery of the next booger than the meditation you were hoping I would focus on! I chuckled heartily, and I think of you now whenever the gold-digging urge threatens to overpower me in church.
The refrain of your meditations, so calmly and constantly asserted, is the need for vigilance—not necessarily against manifest evil, but rather the “sadness, fear, and weariness” which so easily creep into good hearts and swerve them from their holy purposes.20 The metaphor of sleep, so personified in the drowsy apostles near Jesus as he sweats blood and offers himself to the Father, is both a reproach and a challenge to us who strive to fight as you did: nobly, calmly, with a steely resolve rooted in prayer. I think of your meditations, Saint Thomas, as a scriptural pep talk, a twofold encouragement coming from both Jesus and yourself, designed to sustain you then, and us now, when yielding or quitting seems much more desirable than perseverance.
You were well aware that “other tyrants and tormentors”21 would rise and dominate human affairs throughout the centuries. You were equally aware that the internal caesars of vice and sin are much more prevalent and even destructive of souls than external rulers. And yet regardless of the ruler, there can be no despair when the Lord of hope is invoked, and the light of fervent prayer in darkness