There's More
I haven't gotten to Henry VIII, Richard Rich, Tyndale and, of course, the burning issue: just where is St. Thomas' head?
But you'll have to wait a bit since I've in the very last throes of creating the schedule and hand-outs for Making Disciples.
But I'm letting you know right now:
If part of having a saint for a father is pickling his
par-boiled,severed head as Margaret Roper did, it's all over.
Relic or no relic, I'm never going to be Catholic enough for that and someone should have warned me when I signed up.
posted by Sherry W @ 6:09 PM
3 Comments
3 Comments:
Modern mores vs More
Just one concern. How does one present More's activities as Lord Chancellor (i.e. the arrest and execution of Lutherans) which modern mores won't exactly approve of, much less understand?
Not to mention his ascetic practices- wearing a hair shirt and practicing flagellation?
antonio, yes if you cherry pick things saints do you can justify any sort of denigration. Thomas More knew what was at stake and the way he acted was in accord with the way Tudor England did things. An extremely good book to read is More's bio by Peter Acroyd and it's still in print.
Thomas More's dealing to heretics was little different to St Augustin dealing to Donatists and Pelagians. After a considerable time of watching heresy eat its way into the fabric of Christianity and destroying freedom, exasperation gives way to rage. They were warned just as Jesus warned of the fate awaiting those who lead the innocent and the vulnerable astray.
It's very hard for us to put ourselves into a time when NO ONE (not Protestants, not Catholics, not the state, NO ONE)thought it was possible to have a peaceful united country without uniformity in religion. For More and Luther and Calvin and Henry VIII, the whole fabric of the kingdom and its government hung in the balance.
The 130 years of religious wars spawned by the Reformation hadn't taken place yet and the horrors vicious decades of religious wars were *exactly* what everyone was afraid of.
1/3 of Germany's people *died* in those wars. If we thought that 1/3 of the US's population would be brutally killed in religious civil war if we didn't enforce uniformity of faith, we would quickly start to reconsider our attitudes, I think.
So More, as a statesmann had two burning issues: 1) the welfare and peace of the whole realm; 2) the salvation of the souls of those in error.
Being a 16th century man, he believed, as did Calvin and Luther, that serious heresy schism meant that you were going to Hell.
Today, when practically every Catholic I've ever met is a de facto universalist, this naturally seems perposterous. We assume that it must be a cover for something else - but it wasn't, you know.
In all the heresy cases that More tried, only four ended in death sentences because More would make huge efforts to convince the accussed to recant before the sentence was carried out.
We, of course, regard that as a unspeakable violation of someone's conscience but in More's day, it was the route of mercy.
In his private life, toward his own son-in-law, Will Roper - who was an outspoken Lutheran for a while - More took a very different tact.
When arguement failed, he told Meg, Roper's wife, that he had given her husband over to God and would do nothing but pray for him.
Will Roper soon returned to the Catholic faith and remained a fervant Catholic the rest of his life. He always regarded his reconversion as the fruit of his father-in-law's prayers.
When, 60 years after More's death, Frances de Sales set out on foot to personally reconvert a entire region of alpine France where every Catholic church had been pad-locked for 60 years (because the ruler of the territory had become Protestant and it was assumed that all his subjects would just have to change faiths with him), it was revolutionary.
"Let us see what love will do" was his motto. But de Sales lived 3 generations after More. He was not only a saint but he had also experienced the terrible consequences of religious civil war in France.
The great French saints of his generation all sought to substitute evangelization, prayer, and charity for the armed struggled that had failed. But that was after the wars, not before it.
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