A reading of the holy gospel according to Matthew. Jesus said to his disciples, do not give what is holy to dogs. Do not toss your pearls before swine. They will trample them underfoot at best and perhaps even tear you to shreds. Treat others the way you would have them treat you.
This sums up the law and the prophets. Enter through the narrow gate. The gate that leads to damnation is wide. The road is clear, and many choose to follow it. But how narrow is the gate that leads to life?
How rough that road and how few there are who find it. This is the good news of the lord. The name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. Yesterday was the feast of Saint John Fisher and Saint Thomas Moore and also of Saint Peter, I would say, Paulinus of Nola. And I cannot let the celebration of the memorial of John Fisher and Thomas More pass by.
You must bear with my enthusiasm about these two gentlemen. Because first of all, they were gentlemen, but they also were absolutely solid Christians. It is very difficult for us to appreciate how extraordinary these men were. In the whole of the English hierarchy, it was only John Fisher who refused to take the oath, only one. Think of that.
Supposing we had a situation like that in The United States, when the whole of the hierarchy, granting that there would be some confusion, We don't have any confusion these days, of course, but then they had confusion. So here you have a state of doubt where people aren't sure just what they should do. Remember, it wasn't a question of being a protestant. Henry the eighth was the defender of the faith against Protestantism. So it wasn't a it wasn't a matter of of of Luther or Calvin or Knox.
It was a matter of a man who professed to be and practiced his Catholicism. And supposing in this country you had a situation, and it's not beyond the shadow of a doubt that it might happen, where a certain kind of oath of allegiance would be required and you saw the whole hierarchy going along with it. That would be a pretty good sign that it that that truth might lie in that direction. So John Fisher stood up a lonely and a lone man and said, no, I will not take the oath of supremacy. And that oath's consistent not in the renunciation of the Catholic faith, not at all.
It simply meant that you recognized the king of England as the head of the English Catholic church. That's all it meant, and you can easily see that that was a very fine point. I'm not minimizing. There was no the council of Trent hadn't taken place yet. Infallibility was far from being defined.
That wasn't defined until the last century in Cardinal Newman's time. So you didn't have these things to appeal to, and yet it was John Fisher who stood up and Thomas More. It was an issue completely academic almost, almost completely academic. And what guided these two men to to to be such to give such an heroic defense of the church because that's what it is. Who can explain it except the grace of god?
Now coming back to Moore, I I I dearly love that man, and I knew a good bit about him before he was made so popular by A Man for All Seasons, which is, I think, a exemplary show, which has made him very popular. But this is going to sort of shock you, but I'm just reading a bit of Lord Byron. When I wanna go on a loose, I read a bit of him. He's bound to make you mad. But I found this sentence in his Don Juan where he has the character speak, that is Lord Byron has the character speak, that all pleasures are sin, and some sins are pleasure.
The logic of that is excellent. It's a converted proposition. But notice, all pleasures are sin. Now there are plenty of people today believe that. Plenty of people believe that today.
It certainly did in Byron's time and certainly did in Thomas More's time. Not so much then, but but they did. Now the point is this, Thomas More stands up as a man of the world, but not captivated by the world. He stands up foursquare. He was a man with a sense of dignity.
He was a man with a sense of his position. He was a man with a sense of his responsibilities to his wife, to his country, to learning. Remember, he was a great friend of Erasmus. Remember, Moore and Fisher were the were the bright lights of the of the so called renaissance in England. They were renaissance men.
They weren't Aristotelians. They were greatly devoted to Plato. I forgive them for that, but everybody's allowed to one bite. So here we have a man who who who had a position. He came he wasn't a noble.
He came from nothing, really, and he became the first layman to be the lord high chancellor of England. The first one who was a layman. All the rest had been clerics. And here was a man who reached the apex of power, who had a beautiful home, which he prided himself on. He loved his estate along the Thames.
He gave himself to it. He knew what pleasure was, and he gave himself the pleasure. And he didn't think it was a sin to have a good home, a good family, a good wife, and enjoy them. He didn't think there was anything sinful than that at all because he had some common sense, which Byron missed at times. And yet that man, when you see that big beautiful, portrait of him in his lord chancellor's robes, remember under that robe, you had a hair shirt.
This is not fiction because you see, now this brings the the the man together. He knew the world. He knew it as a gift of God. He knew it to be good, and he knew it as something to be used, and he did it. He became a highly successful lawyer, had a beautiful estate, a wonderful family, the the closest friend of the king.
What more could a man ask? Well, Thomas More asked more than that. He asked to be a saint because he knew he was called to be a saint, not because he was a saint, but because that was his calling. And that's where you are, and that's where I am. Let's not shy away from this.
Either we make that, either we do become saints, or we fail utterly. This isn't this is no hyperbole. When you talk about salvation, what are you talking about? So with all of this, more had something else. And to read the the account of those last days of his in the in the in the tower and how he conversed with his family and his friends, and how he had to argue to defend his position because they thought he was crazy.
Even his dear dear dear wife couldn't understand why he could be so bullheaded, that he was not only putting his own head on the block, but he was sacrificing his family. How do you do that? Only if there's a higher cause, a higher obligation, and Moore was very conscious of that. That as dearly as he loved his family, he was he was the most affectionate man. As dearly as he loved them, he loved God more because he couldn't love them as he did love them unless he loved God.
And so, my friends, I know I'm a little nutty about Moore, but the point is we all should know more about this man and have him on not a pedestal, Moore was a man. That's the beauty of it. He was one of us. He had his faults, but he knew who he was. He knew where he was.
He knew where he was going, and he put them all together. This is the problem to get the get it all together. Anybody can practice one virtue. The problem is to hold them all together, and Moore did that. And here we have a concrete example that we can can look up to.
And with the grace of god, we can say, I can do it too. It isn't what my past has been. It's what the present is and all the promise of the future. How do I know that? Because god says so and sent his son, Jesus Christ, to prove it.
In the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit. Amen.