Saint Thomas More: How beautiful are the ways of the Lord.

Public Arguments: Saint Thomas More

By Michael Novak

June is a happy month to stress the office of the papacy, for it is the month of two great saints’ days, the feast of Saint Thomas More, one of the greatest saints of the English-speaking world, and the feast of Saints Peter and Paul. Both of these celebrations are linked—it was for his fidelity to the office of Peter that Thomas More cheerfully laid his neck on the block, having taken care to protect, as he pointed out, his innocent beard.

In our time, the office of Peter may have proved to be more useful to the Christian faith than at any time in the past. Among all the religious institutions in the Communist world during the long darkness of the years 1917-1989, those whose leaders had a lifeline to Rome were best protected. Against the Communist authorities, the bishops who maintained union with Rome always had one last defense: “I am not the final authority, I must defer to the Pope.” The Pope was their bond of unity across national frontiers. Of course, the bond in the Spirit that Christians always have with one another also reaches across every frontier of space and time. But in the papacy this bond is, so to say, rendered physical, sacramental, witnessed to (even with all attendant weaknesses). And so, when Pope John Paul II began to travel in the flesh to Communist Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Ukraine, the almost physical magnetism of the sacrament of Holy Orders radiated with extraordinary power throughout the countryside, as eyewitnesses still attest, and launched an era-ending revolution.

Moreover, in an age characterized by the world-circling eye of television, the camera can focus on one man—the Pope—in a way that it cannot focus on a conclave, conference, or council, as a concrete symbol of unity. One of the great mysteries of Christianity is incarnation: the stunning and even scandalous fact that God would reveal Himself not (say) in world-terrifying brilliance or overpowering voice, but in the humble form of human flesh, in Jesus Christ. Analogously, Jesus left on earth a human vicar, not at all divine, a humble man of flesh and blood and human faults: Peter and his successors. In this altogether humble and fleshly way, the focal point of the worldwide Christian community is the successor of Peter. (The life, authority, and grace of the Church come, of course, not from Peter but from the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.)

It is providential, then, that the calendar of the Church assigns June 22 to the feast of Saints Thomas More and John Fisher and June 29 to the feast of Saints Peter and Paul. For the first feast points to the second, and on the second we celebrate our worldwide communion with Peter (and that other great apostle, Paul).

Today’s secular communitarians don’t hold a candle to the sort of community that figures in the Catholic imagination: a community of saints that stretches backwards and forwards in time like the stars of the milky way, joining the living and the dead, and not hesitating to include angels and archangels, cherubim, seraphim, and all the heavenly host. The Catholic liturgy, the great twentieth-century theologian Romano Guardini once wrote, is “all creation redeemed and at prayer.” The visible sign of this unity is communion with Rome. This month, CRISIS celebrates it.

Today’s Papal Initiative: The Catholicism of Vatican II ....

Thomas More, Layman ....

The Context of More’s Life (1478-1535) ....

Times Out of Joint: On Reading More’s Utopia ....

Contemporary Christophobia ....

Called to Holiness ....

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