St. Thomas More

St. Thomas More was born on February 7, 1478, in London, the son of a lawyer and judge. Educated at Oxford and the Inns of Court, he became one of the most brilliant lawyers and humanist scholars of his age, a friend of Erasmus and author of Utopia (1516). As a young man he seriously weighed a monastic vocation, living for a time near the London Charterhouse, before discerning that God was calling him to marriage, family, and public life. He remained a man of deep prayer and asceticism throughout his career, raising his children — daughters as well as sons — with an education remarkable for the era. His integrity and ability carried him steadily upward in the service of King Henry VIII: member of Parliament, diplomat, speaker of the House of Commons, and finally, in 1529, Lord Chancellor of England — the first layman to hold the office. He was renowned as an incorruptible judge and a formidable defender of Catholic teaching in his writings. When the king moved to annul his marriage and to claim supremacy over the Church in England, More resigned the chancellorship in 1532 and withdrew into silence, hoping to live quietly with his conscience intact. Silence was not permitted. Refusing the oath acknowledging the royal supremacy, he was imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1534, where he wrote his moving Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation. Convicted of treason on perjured testimony, he was beheaded on Tower Hill on July 6, 1535, declaring that he died 'the king's good servant, but God's first.' He was beatified by Pope Leo XIII in 1886 and canonized in 1935 by Pope Pius XI, together with his fellow martyr St. John Fisher; their joint feast is kept on June 22. In 2000 Pope John Paul II declared him the patron of statesmen and politicians. His witness — that no earthly power may command a conscience formed by God — has made him one of the most widely admired saints of the modern age. His body lies in the chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula in the Tower of London, and his head, according to tradition, in the Roper family vault at St. Dunstan's, Canterbury.