The King’s Good Servants, but God’s First: Fisher, More, and Post-Christian Britain
MASS Multae tribulationes
LESSON 2 Maccabees 6:18–28
GOSPEL St John 10: 23-30
HOMILIST Mt Revd Jerome Lloyd OSJV
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
“Many are the afflictions of the just; but out of them all will the Lord deliver them.” The Introit of this Mass does not flatter the Christian life. It does not say: few are the afflictions of the just; nor: light are the afflictions of the just. It says: many. The just man will be opposed, tested, isolated, threatened, misrepresented, and, if God so permits, slain. But the same verse gives the Christian victory: “out of them all will the Lord deliver them.” Not by avoiding the Cross, but by passing through it.
This is the key to today’s feast of Saints John Fisher and Thomas More. They were not martyrs because they loved controversy. They were not rebels against authority. They were not private men setting conscience against the Church. They were Catholic Englishmen who understood that no earthly power, however ancient, splendid, legal, constitutional, or terrifying, can command a soul to lie against God.
John Fisher was born at Beverley in Yorkshire in 1469. He became one of the great ornaments of Cambridge, its Chancellor, a scholar, preacher, reformer, and from 1504 Bishop of Rochester. Rochester was the poorest see in England, but Fisher remained there for more than thirty years, not climbing like a courtier, but watching like a shepherd. When Luther’s errors began to spread, Fisher wrote powerfully in defence of the sacraments, the priesthood, the Holy Eucharist, and the visible authority of the Church. He was a bishop in the ancient and apostolic sense: not a manager of religious feeling, but a father in God, a teacher of revealed truth, and a guardian of souls.
Thomas More was born in London in 1478. He was a layman, husband, father, lawyer, judge, scholar, statesman, and eventually Lord Chancellor of England. He knew the world from within: courts, parliaments, diplomacy, public responsibility, friendship, humour, danger. He wore a hair shirt beneath the robes of office. He prayed, studied, governed his household, and served his country. He was not a monk mistaken for a statesman. He was a Catholic layman who understood that public office does not dispense a man from sanctity.
Then came the great trial. Henry VIII, once praised as defender of the Faith against Luther, desired to put away Queen Catherine and take Anne Boleyn. When the Pope would not declare lawful what was not lawful, the king’s desire became a national revolution. The Act of Succession in 1534 required an oath touching the legitimacy of Anne’s issue and, in practice, the repudiation of the Pope’s authority in the king’s marriage. The Act of Supremacy that same year declared Henry “Supreme Head” on earth of the Church in England. The issue was no longer merely dynastic. It was whether Christ had founded His Church upon Peter, or whether a king, by statute, pressure, and fear, could make himself master in spiritual things.
Here this feast speaks directly to Britain now. The question of Crown and Faith did not end with Henry VIII. It remains embedded in the constitution, though often emptied of supernatural seriousness. The Sovereign still bears the title “Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church of England”; the Royal Household’s own account traces these titles back to Henry VIII and the rupture with Rome. The coronation still speaks of God, Gospel, oath, altar, anointing, and sacred duty. Yet the surrounding culture increasingly treats these things as pageantry rather than truth, as heritage rather than obligation, as ceremony rather than covenant. (The Royal Family)
This must be said carefully. The Catholic critique is not a personal attack upon the monarch, nor a rejection of monarchy as such, nor a refusal of lawful civic loyalty. We pray for the King. We honour the Crown in its legitimate temporal office. We desire the peace and good order of the realm. But we cannot pretend that constitutional Christianity can remain healthy when the Faith itself is treated as a symbolic inheritance rather than a binding truth. The danger is not the Crown as such; the danger is a post-Christian political culture that retains Christian forms while denying Christian substance.
That is the peculiar temptation of post-Christian Britain. It does not always abolish Christian language. It preserves it, polishes it, broadcasts it, and then drains it of command. It likes cathedrals, choirs, coronations, candles, vestments, royal services, and the moral afterglow of Christianity. It wants the beauty of the Christian inheritance without the yoke of Christ; the splendour of monarchy without divine judgement; the language of service without the law of God; the social fruit of the Gospel without repentance, grace, or the Cross.
But Fisher and More will not allow such comfortable theatre. They remind us that a Christian realm is not made by ancient words if those words no longer bind the conscience. A coronation oath cannot be treated as devotional decoration. The title Defender of the Faith cannot be reduced to the custodianship of religious atmosphere, the management of spiritual diversity, or the patronage of a vague national kindness. To defend the Faith means, first, that there is a Faith to defend: revealed, objective, binding, supernatural, and not subject to reinvention by Crown, Parliament, press, academy, or popular mood.
The Collect of today’s Mass is therefore exact. God raised up John and Thomas “from among the English to be the defenders of the true faith and of the primacy of the holy Roman Church,” and we ask that “we may all become and remain one by the profession of the same faith.” That is Catholic unity: not institutional sentiment, not ceremonial respectability, not religious vocabulary stretched until it can mean everything and therefore nothing, but unity in the same revealed Faith under the authority Christ gave to His Church. Fisher and More died because England was being asked to call schism communion, adultery marriage, and royal appetite ecclesiastical authority.
The Lesson gives us Eleazar, the venerable scribe of the Old Law. He was not asked openly to apostatise. He was asked to pretend. He could bring his own lawful meat, appear to eat the forbidden flesh, and so save his life. It was a compromise. It was discreet. It preserved influence. It avoided embarrassment. It sounded eminently prudent.
But Eleazar saw what the compromisers did not see: the young were watching. If he pretended, they would learn that appearances matter more than truth. They would learn that religious ambiguity is a small price to pay for survival. They would learn that old men may save themselves by teaching young men cowardice. So he refused. “It doth not become our age,” says the sacred text, “to dissemble.”
That sentence could be written over the Tower of London. It could also be written over the Britain of our own day. It does not become a Christian country to dissemble. It does not become public authorities to dissemble, speaking reverently of faith while legislating as though man were self-creating, sex were arbitrary, life were disposable, marriage were plastic, childhood were raw material for ideology, and conscience were tolerable only when domesticated by the state. It does not become bishops to dissemble. It does not become priests to dissemble. It does not become Catholic citizens to dissemble, pretending that the public rejection of God is neutral, or that a society can deny Christ and retain indefinitely the justice, mercy, restraint, and dignity that came from Him.
John Fisher would not dissemble. Almost the entire English episcopate bent before the king. Fisher stood. The old bishop of a poor see became greater in chains than courtiers in silk. Pope Paul III created him Cardinal in May 1535, as though Rome herself would place the red of martyrdom upon him before the axe did. Henry raged that the Pope might send Fisher a cardinal’s hat, but Fisher would have no head to wear it. On 22 June 1535, weak in body but clear in soul, he went to the scaffold. Before death he opened the Gospel and read: “Now this is eternal life: That they may know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.” That verse is today’s Alleluia. It is the martyr’s whole theology. Eternal life is not to know the safe formula, the fashionable compromise, or the latest settlement between conscience and power. Eternal life is to know the true God and Jesus Christ whom He has sent.
Thomas More would not dissemble either. He was careful, legally precise, restrained in speech. He did not seek death. He resigned office. He kept silence where silence was lawful. But when silence was interpreted as treason, and when the perjury of Richard Rich was used to condemn him, the machinery of Tudor power revealed what it had become. More would not swear away the truth of marriage, conscience, and the primacy of the Apostolic See. His own family pleaded with him. Friends urged him to conform outwardly. The whole kingdom pressed upon one Catholic conscience. But conscience, for More, was not the modern idol of self-will. It was the duty to obey the truth already given by God.
On 6 July 1535, Thomas More was beheaded. His last testimony has come down to us in that luminous phrase: he died “the King’s good servant, but God’s first.” There is Catholic civil obedience in one sentence. The king has rights; God has absolute rights. The state may command much; it may not command sin. Law may regulate temporal order; it may not redefine creation, sacrament, conscience, marriage, life, death, nature, or the Church of Christ.
This is precisely the point Britain must hear again. Loyalty to the Crown is not servility before the state. Love of country is not submission to whatever ideology temporarily captures its institutions. Respect for law is not the worship of legislation. Parliament can make statutes; it cannot make evil good. Courts can interpret law; they cannot alter the moral order. Governments can regulate civic life; they cannot absolve man from the judgement of God. A Christian may be the monarch’s good servant, the nation’s good citizen, the neighbour’s good friend; but he must be God’s first, or he will soon cease to be good in any lesser loyalty.
The Gospel deepens the matter. Our Lord walks in the Temple, in Solomon’s porch. He is pressed: “If thou be the Christ, tell us plainly.” He answers that He has spoken, but they have not believed. Then He gives the mark of His own: “My sheep hear my voice: and I know them, and they follow me.” Fisher and More heard that voice. Henry’s voice was louder in England. Parliament’s voice was legally stronger. The bishops’ collective failure made Christ’s voice seem almost isolated. But the sheep know the Shepherd not by volume, not by success, not by political inevitability, but by truth.
This feast is therefore not antiquarian. We do not honour Fisher and More because Tudor England supplies dramatic history. We honour them because the same contest returns in every age. Today the pressure is often softer, more bureaucratic, more therapeutic, more plausibly humanitarian. Few are asked at once to mount a scaffold. Many are asked to make peace with ambiguity. Many are asked to pretend that a post-Christian moral order is merely neutral. Many are asked to call moral disorder compassion, doctrinal collapse inclusion, apostasy progress, censorship safety, and the silencing of Christian conscience equality.
This is the new oath demanded by the secular state: not always spoken, but everywhere implied. Swear that man has no given nature. Swear that the body has no stable meaning. Swear that freedom means self-invention. Swear that children belong first to ideology rather than to God and family. Swear that religion is acceptable only when private, sentimental, and obedient to the new moral consensus. Swear that Christian civilisation was oppressive except where its remains are still useful for national ceremony.
The Christian cannot swear it. He may be courteous. He may be patient. He may obey just laws. He may serve in public office. He may honour the monarch. He may pray for Parliament. He may seek peace with all men. But he may not lie. He may not say that Christ is one decorative voice among many. He may not say that the Gospel is merely a heritage resource. He may not say that the law of God is a private preference. He may not say that the Faith once delivered to the saints can be trimmed to fit the reigning ideology of the hour.
The crisis in Britain and the crisis in the Church meet here. For when the Church herself loses confidence that the Faith is worth suffering for, she can no longer convert a post-Christian nation. If shepherds prefer management to martyrdom, if ecclesiastical language becomes so elastic that error can hide inside it, if unity is invoked without the same profession of faith for which today’s Collect prays, then the Church offers the nation not salvation but an echo of its own confusion. Fisher and More teach us that obedience is holy only when ordered to God. They did not deny the king’s lawful authority; they denied his unlawful claim. They did not despise order; they refused disorder dressed as law. They did not break unity; they clung to the divinely constituted unity of the Church when their nation broke from it.
For the laity, Thomas More is urgent. He shows that holiness is not reserved to sanctuary and cloister. The Catholic father, mother, lawyer, teacher, doctor, councillor, student, worker, and public servant must sometimes carry martyrdom in ordinary places: in what one refuses to sign, refuses to say, refuses to celebrate, refuses to teach, refuses to bless, refuses to pretend. The modern world often does not demand that Catholics stop believing at once. It demands that they stop acting as if belief is true. More answers: no. Truth is not an ornament of private life. Christ is King also in the conscience, the household, the court, the school, Parliament, and the realm.
For bishops and priests, John Fisher is terrible and consoling. Terrible, because he shows what episcopal office is for. A bishop is not consecrated to be the chaplain of consensus. He is not ordained to preserve his place in a structure while wolves enter the fold. He is set as a watchman. He must speak when silence would betray souls. He must strengthen his brethren when fear has made prudence cowardly. But Fisher is consoling too, because one bishop standing with Christ outweighs a multitude bending with the age. Numbers do not canonise compromise. Isolation does not disprove truth.
At the Communion, Holy Church places upon our lips the words of the Shepherd: “My sheep hear My voice and I know them, and they follow Me: and I give unto them eternal life, and they shall never perish.” That is the promise. Not that we shall never suffer. Not that the Church on earth will never pass through humiliation. Not that our families, parishes, clergy, or nations will be spared testing. But that no man can pluck Christ’s sheep from His hand if they will hear and follow.
The martyrs heard. Fisher heard in his prison. More heard before his judges. Eleazar heard before the torment. They heard the same Shepherd, professed the same Faith, and chose the same God above every command of man.
So let us ask Saints John Fisher and Thomas More for a clean conscience, but not the counterfeit conscience of self-excuse; for obedience, but not the counterfeit obedience that obeys man against God; for loyalty, but not the counterfeit loyalty that flatters a nation while permitting its apostasy; for unity, but not the counterfeit unity that hides division beneath official language; for courage, but not the noisy courage of vanity. Let us pray for the King: that his crown may be illumined by the crown of Christ. Let us pray for Parliament: that law may again bend before divine law. Let us pray for this realm: that it may remember the God without Whom no nation is finally free, just, or safe.
“Many are the afflictions of the just.” The Mass told us that at the beginning. The saints prove it. But the Mass also tells us the end: “out of them all will the Lord deliver them.” He delivered Fisher and More not by opening the prison door, but by opening heaven. He delivered them not from the axe, but through the axe. And He will deliver His Church and, if we repent, this nation too — not by blessing our evasions, not by baptising our secularism, not by turning Christian monarchy into pageant and Christian faith into sentiment, but by making us faithful again: God’s first, truly one, “by the profession of the same faith.”
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
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