Our Patron
St Thomas More, 1478–1535
A lawyer and scholar who read the classics for pleasure, argued with Erasmus for friendship, served his king faithfully, and would not say a thing he did not believe.
Thomas More was born in London in 1478, the son of a judge. He read law, but he also read Greek, which in England at that time was nearly an eccentricity. He learned it well enough to translate Lucian, to correspond as an equal with Erasmus, and to fill a household in Chelsea with books, conversation and the education of his daughters at a time when few thought daughters needed educating.
A working life of the mind
He was not a man withdrawn from the world. He was an undersheriff of London, a Member of Parliament, a diplomat, a negotiator for English merchants, and eventually Lord Chancellor of England. He wrote Utopia, a book still argued over five centuries later, precisely because he refused to make it easy. His learning was not decoration; it was the instrument of a working public life.
Conscience
When Henry VIII required the realm to acknowledge him as supreme head of the Church in England, More neither campaigned nor denounced. He simply declined to swear. He resigned the chancellorship, lived quietly, and kept silent, and silence, it turned out, was intolerable to power. He was imprisoned in the Tower, tried on perjured evidence, and beheaded on 6 July 1535.
I die the King's good servant, and God's first.
Thomas More, on the scaffold, 1535
Why he is our patron
More is a model of exactly what a liberal arts education is for. He was formed by the classics and the faith, and that formation held when it cost him everything. He was witty, sociable, a good lawyer and a better friend, and entirely unwilling to let convenience decide what he would call true.
He was canonised in 1935, and is the patron saint of statesmen, lawyers and politicians. We take his name because we want the kind of education that produces people like him: clear-thinking, cheerful, and immovable on the things that matter.
A prayer of St Thomas More
O Lord, give me a mind that is humble, quiet, peaceable, patient and charitable, and a taste of your Holy Spirit in all my thoughts, words, and deeds.
O Lord, give me a lively faith, a firm hope, a fervent charity, a love of you. Take from me all lukewarmness in meditation and all dullness in prayer. Give me fervor and delight in thinking of you, your grace, and your tender compassion toward me.
Give me, good Lord, the grace to work for the things I pray for. Lord, grant me a holy heart that sees always what is true and pure and is not frightened at the sight of sin, but creates order wherever it goes.
Grant me a heart that knows nothing of boredom, weeping, and sighing. Let me not be too concerned with the bothersome thing I call "myself." Lord, give me a sense of humor, and I will find happiness in life and profit for others.
Amen.
For more on St Thomas More
Who is St Thomas More? · Sacred Heart University, Connecticut, USA