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To Saint Thomas More, the king’s good servant, and God’s first:

Above my desk is a print of your silhouette, taken from the famous Holbein portrait, set against the text of one of your prison letters to your daughter Meg. A monastic confrere of mine created it for me, and I have placed it in my university office to guard and guide me in my work. Gazing at it now, the thought of penning some scribbled musings to you strikes me as silly. I have often succumbed to the temptation to write nothing at all to you, rather than organize a vast array of half-baked inspirations arising from your life and writings. With much hesitation, then, do I address myself to you, a man so eminently endowed with that rare combination of learning, humor, and holiness. Given your delight at the fact that your last name means “foolishness” in Greek, you would likely chuckle as you chide me for flattering you at the outset of this letter. How can I properly express my debt to your intellectual genius and “good mother wit?”13 What is the proper way for me to thank you for your witness of faith against tyranny, and your courage in the face of martyrdom? And how can I worthily receive the inheritance which you, my patron saint, have bequeathed to me, and which I have so often neglected?

Perhaps the best place to begin is my own acquaintance with your legacy, both secular and sacred. I take as my starting point a verse from the pen of Saint Paul, who encouraged the Corinthians, “Be imitators of me as I am of Christ” (1 Cor 11:1). If to imitate a saint is to imitate Christ, then you have made me more like our Lord than I ever could have hoped to be without your example. To be sure, I have not imitated you to the letter. My desire to be a lawyer irretrievably evaporated in high school thanks to a nauseatingly boring summer at a law firm. Nor have I followed your footsteps as a husband and father. On this score, it may seem strange that a monk vowed to celibacy should take as his patron a lawyer, statesman, and family man. Yet I consider your sponsorship of my monastic and priestly life an immense and altogether appropriate gift.

Your own discernment as a young man greatly helped me in my youth, particularly as I wrestled with a vocation to the abbey I now call home. While engaged in your legal studies, you resided with Carthusian monks, praying with them as your studies allowed and pondering your own future. You either uttered or wrote down a phrase which I found quite comforting as I grew increasingly agitated with my own discernment of the Lord’s will for my life. You feared that you would be a “licentious priest,” and determined instead that you would be capable of being “a chaste husband.”14 The ways of providence guided me to the same terms, but the opposite conclusion: I was made to be, by the grace of God, a chaste priest rather than a licentious husband.

But your discernment was simply one of many aspects that drew me to you. In requesting to adopt the name Thomas as my own to symbolize my new life as a monk, I looked to you as my model. My abbot was good enough to grant me the name Thomas, thus equipping my monastic community with a novel but powerful intercessor. I was attracted to your humor and humanism, by which you manifested the full glory of the human being alive in God, whether through secular politics, religious devotion, or pranks on your family and friends. I have pondered what a privilege it must have been to be a guest in your home at Chelsea. The accounts of your dinners and evening entertainment are filled with delightful memories of music, laughter, poetry, hearty banter, and shenanigans done by the family pet monkey. Your children would have shamed me in a Latin contest, but I would have made a great effort to prove to you that my learning was not half lame. I would then have challenged you to prove the same! I have always envied your dear colleague Erasmus, who noted that you were a natural friend to all, indeed one “born for friendship”15—what a treasure it would have been to know you in the flesh!

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 surely generates confidence amidst great tribulation.

A quote embedded in my mind is the final petition of the entire book, summarizing everything in a humble sentence: “The things, good Lord, that I pray for, give me the grace to labor for. Amen.”22 Earlier in the meditation, you had noted, “We are reluctant to pray for anything (however useful) that we are reluctant to receive.”23 Your final request of the Lord, perhaps only days or weeks before you met the executioner’s sword, is a reminder to us that boldness in prayer is itself a sign of trust in the loving Lord who bestows abundantly.

You knew, of course, how the story would end: the garden of Gethsemane prepares Jesus for Calvary, but that experience makes possible the glory of Easter Sunday. You foresaw the dissection of Christendom already underway in Germany and now in your beloved England, not to mention the forfeiture of your own head as an enemy of the newly minted head of the English Church. Yet there you were on the chopping block, at once forgiving your executioner and requesting that he not cut your beard, “For that,” you noted, “has not committed treason!”24 What a wonderfully strange quirk of final perseverance!

You were fond of saying to friends, “Pray for me as I will for you, that we may merrily meet in Heaven,”25 especially as your entrance into Paradise drew near. I often conclude letters with that very same line, though I certainly hope to meet the addressee again here on earth before that final encounter. Since I never had the honor of dining with you at Chelsea, I will eagerly await a far more unforgettable banquet, full of mirth and puns and excessive displays of wit, assured that your prayers will help me arrive at the table without incident! And so I finish this missive with that same request: pray for me, good More, that we may merrily meet in heaven.

12. Saint Thomas More (1477–1535) was an English lawyer, writer, husband, father, Renaissance humanist, and theologian. He rose to the rank of Lord Chancellor under King Henry VIII. After refusing to swear the Oath of Supremacy and therefore acknowledge Henry as Supreme Head of the Church of England, More was executed. The Catholic Church venerates him as a martyr. Among his best known writings are Utopia and The Sadness of Christ.

13. More, A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, 132.

14. Wegemer, A Portrait of Courage, 11.

15. See Wegemer and Smith, A Thomas More Source Book, 6.

16. Pope Benedict XVI, “Meeting with the Representatives of British Society including the Diplomatic Corps, Politicians, Academics, and Business Leaders,” para. 6.

17. Chesterton, “A Turning Point in History,” In The Fame of Blessed Thomas More, 63–64.

18. Ibid., 64.

19. Ratzinger, “Homily for Mass,” para. 11.

20. More, Sadness of Christ, 17.

21. Ibid., 100.

22. Ibid., 155.

23. Ibid., 35.

24. Froude, A History of England, 276–77.

25. Rogers, St. Thomas More, 258.