AB Chaput Endorses St Thomas More---But St Thomas Is A Humanist!

St Thomas More and his family by Hans Holbein.  One of the family monkeys is in the lower right hand corner next to Alice More.

One of the trends of the conservative church that has always amused me is the continual dragging forth of St Thomas More to bolster their point.  Off hand I can't think of too many Catholic right wing enterprises that don't feature Thomas More with regularity. Come to think of it,  the same kind of thing is happening with Cardinal Newman.  The truth about Thomas More is that he was not a conservative thinker.  They don't call him one of the fathers of humanism for nothing.  While he was also a staunch defender of Catholicism--he did preside over the burning of Lutheran heretics--he was far more complicated than that.  I would say he was sorely conflicted between his secular speculations and his religious training and couldn't find a reasonable way out of his entangled mind.  Which I suppose is why he is my favorite saint.  In the end he died for his faith, not necessarily for the Church.  He thought the Church was virtually overrun with ambitious clerics and outright corruption.

So while I don't find it surprising that AB Chaput waxes eloquently about Thomas More, I do find it somewhat amusing because based on what he wrote in Utopia, More would have been a democrat, if not an outright socialist.

Archbishop Chaput Writes on the Call To Martyrdom

By Archbishop Charles J. Chaput
Archbishop of Philadelphia
PHILADELPHIA, NOV. 23, 2012 (Zenit.org).- The Church has many good reasons why people should believe in God, believe in Jesus Christ and believe in the beauty and urgency of her own mission.  But she has only one irrefutable argument for the truth of what she teaches – the personal example of her saints.
Over this Thanksgiving weekend, or sometime during Advent, I have a homework assignment for you.  I want you to rent or buy or borrow a copy of the 1966 film about Sir Thomas More, A Man for All Seasons.  I want you to watch it with your family.  Here’s why.  More was one of the most distinguished scholars of his time, a brilliant lawyer, a gifted diplomat and a skilled political leader.  Jonathan Swift, the great Anglo-Irish writer, once described him as the “person of the greatest virtue this kingdom (of England) ever produced.”

Above all, Thomas More was a man of profound Catholic faith and practice.  He lived what he claimed to believe.  He had his priorities in right order.  He was a husband and a father first; a man who – in the words of Robert Bolt, the author of the original play and the 1966 film – “adored, and was adored, by his own large family.” (He was also one of the few men of his time who insisted his daughters receive the same classical education as his son. Many of his fellow scholars thought he was nuts to waste that kind of education on females.)

A Man for All Seasons won Oscars for both Best Picture and Best Actor, and it’s clearly one of the great stories ever brought to the screen.  But it captures only a small fraction of the real man. In his daily life, Thomas More loved to laugh.  He enjoyed life and every one of its gifts.   Erasmus, the great Dutch humanist scholar and a friend of More and his family, described More as a man of “amiable joyousness (and) simple dress … born and framed for friendship … easy of access to all,” uninterested in ceremony and riches, humble, indifferent to food,  unimpressed by opinions of the crowd, and never departing from common sense. (Erasmus also thought St Thomas had compromised his integrity by agreeing to serve in a corrupt monarchy.)

Despite the integrity of More’s character, and despite his faithful service, Henry VIII martyred him in 1535.  More refused to accept the Tudor king’s illicit marriage to Anne Boleyn, and he refused to repudiate his fidelity to the Holy See.  In 1935, the Church declared Thomas More a saint.  Today – half a millennium after he died and a continent away -- this one man’s faith still moves us in our own daily lives.  That’s the power of sainthood.  That’s the power of holiness. (Correction, St Thomas refused to disavow his belief in the religious primacy of the Pope.  In truth he thought the Holy See was a cesspool of corruption which compromised the spiritual mission of the Church.  Kind of like today.)

Here’s the lesson I want to leave you with this week.  We’re all called to martyrdom.  That’s what the word martyr means:  It’s the Greek word for “witness.”  We may or may not ever suffer personally for our love of Jesus Christ.  But we’re all called to be witnesses.

In proclaiming the Year of Faith, Benedict XVI wrote that:
“By faith, across the centuries, men and women of all ages, whose names are written in the Book of Life … have confessed the beauty of following the Lord Jesus wherever they were called to bear witness to the fact that they were Christian: in the family, in the workplace, in public life, in the exercise of the charisms and ministries to which they were called.”

The only thing that matters is to be a saint.  That’s what we need to be.  That’s what we need to become.  And if we can serve God through the witness of our lives by kindling that fire of holiness again in the heart of our local parishes and communities, then the Christ Child who comes to us at Christmas will make all things new – in our Church, in our families and in our nation.
May God grant us all a joy-filled and blessed Thanksgiving.

**********************************************

AB Chaput does have this right, Thomas More loved to laugh.  He even kept his own jester who is reported to have had no problem cutting More's ego down to size.  More's wife however, was not so enamored of their court jester.  One too many jokes about her portly proportions I guess.  But then the poor woman also had to put up with her husbands personal zoo.  While Chancellor of England, More's personal zoo was substantial and contained quite a number of exotic animals.  The monkeys were given the run of his house, as can be seen in the above Holbein painting of the family. Besides the court jester, More would also foster patients from London's infamous Bedlam, the beastly forerunner of mental hospitals. In short he seemed to have a penchant for taking in all kinds of strays and befriending all kinds of marginal people.  Personally I think his wife should be the saint.

To protect his own privacy, More also built his own study separate from the main Chelsea Manor, in which he did most of his writing.  It's shape was based on an octagon for esoteric reasons.  Presumably no monkees were allowed.  One could say he invented the first 'man cave' as he did spend a great deal of time in his study when he was at home,  His children and wife were not allowed in it's holy precincts but this might have been as much for security interests as anything else.

More's life is rarely placed in the context in which he actually lived.  These were momentous times and adjustments to an utterly new reality made belief in religious truths a form of personal security.  The man lived in a period of time in European history when all the rules were changing.  The New World with all it's other humans had been discovered during his teen years.  I don't know that contemporary Catholics can fathom how earth shaking this must have been.  Not only was the Earth round, but it held unknown races of people.  It would be as if we today were suddenly confronted with the existence of actual sentient alien life. On top of this, there was enormous corruption in the church which had precipitated major schisms and protests, of which both Erasmus and More were prolific in their own negative assessments of the institutional church, and like the heretics, they could get their writings read by many people because the printing press was beginning to be felt as the truly consciousness changing invention it was.  Reading and writing were no longer just the province of a minority of educated nobility and clerics.  The power of the intellect was being unleashed in anyone who chose to learn to read and write.  Many men were doing just that which would then spawn the Enlightenment.  It was the humanists like Thomas More who laid the seeds for that future.

But not all of More's writings were of the academic sort. Some of More's less known writings are his pamphlets in which he was essentially the Rush Limbaugh of Catholic apologetics.  I suppose they are less known because he wrote them under a pseudonym--supposedly at the behest of Henry VIII.  A number of these apologetic tracts were written in refutation of Martin Luther and William Tyndale who responded in kind. Luther was furious More was writing under a pseudonym while he Luther, was writing under his own name.  Having read a few of these back and forth pamphlets, I'm not sure any of the men should have been proud of their efforts.  Some of the language was truly spewed forth from a gutter and the personal attacks were vicious and completely juvenile.  They were actually far worse than most of today's internet exchanges, and certainly not the kind of thing that owners of Catholic law schools named after the mythical St Thomas More want known about the real St Thomas More.

It is questionable if Thomas More would have ever been made a saint if Henry VIII hadn't beheaded him.  There was no question of More recanting his position on Henry's marriage or the primacy of the papacy for Roman Catholicism. More became even more religiously conservative after the Lutheran schism.  More's Catholicism was his anchor in a world of change, some of which he embraced and initiated, and some of which he refused to even consider.  For all his open mindedness in some areas, he could be downright close minded in other areas.  He could correspond with off kilter mystics who spouted one form of heresy while at the same time he was executing Lutherans for spouting what he deemed actual heresy.  He could see to it that his daughters were well educated in classical Greek and Latin while he was persecuting Tyndale for translating the bible in to English from the original Greek sources. I suppose the difference lay in More's ability to control his daughter's education but lack of ability to control Tyndale, whose translation very cleverly used particular English words to undercut certain very important Church concepts, like the translation of the Greek word ecclesia as congregation rather than Church.  In any event, the two enemies met the same fate, execution. One is a saint and one is a heretic, at least in the eyes of the Church.

I have no doubt Thomas More is a saint, but not because he was martyred.  At the end of his life, while he was in prison having lost everything, he wrote his most profound works.  They were mystical treatises on his relationship with the Eucharist and with Jesus Christ.  Stripped bare, he was able to reconcile his intellect with his faith and find his personal truth.  He died true to his conscience.  He died a saint not just a martyr.