The name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. As I said, the mass being offered is the mass of the day, of the year, the liturgical year, but it is the feast of Saint Thomas More and Saint John Fisher. And it is in severe contrast to yesterday's feast. Here we had a young boy, he's only 23 years old and dies because he went down to Rome to do what he could to help victims of the plague and became himself its victim. He left no record of great achievements of any sort.
The great thing that he did in his own personal way was to pursue holiness. Then in contrast to that apt anonymous, nondescript, undramatic life of a boy who scarcely entered manhood, he never achieved anything in his mature years. He never had any mature years. Here we have today, the sixteenth century saints, John Moore and Thomas Moore and John Fisher. The contrast is absolutely startling.
Here's Thomas Moore, the first layman who was lord high chancellor of England. Here's a man who was who was not born into a noble or aristocratic family, but who came to be the strongest man in England. Second only to the king, who had an achievement of maturity even as a young man. A man that no matter how you look at him, you admire him. You may beg God to be freed from it from following his example, or you may beg God on your knees not to face the crises that he had to face.
But on the other hand, in all aspects of his life, you have to admire him. Whether it was his attempt to be a priest, a monk, whether it as a married man with his first marriage, when his wife dies he takes a second one, Whether you look at him as a pater familias with his children and his family and his extended family all around him. Success all about him. A man of marvelous ability, of humor, of learning. He was one of the great humanists of England.
A man of great philosophic invention, he wrote the utopia. A man of deep and profound theological learning, and a lawyer, and a mighty successful one, a mighty successful one. A man who was beyond suspicion. For example, in a perfectly legal way, he defended the bishops of England in a matter of property rights. It was an enormously valuable case to them.
And when it was all over and everything was over and done with, they took up a collection among themselves to express their appreciation. There wasn't a thing wrong in in Moore taking any of that. He refused it down to the last penny. He would have none of it. And remember, this Thomas Moore, who was second only to Henry the eighth king of England, when he when he came under this king's displeasure, scarcely had enough of food at one time to feed himself and his family.
That's the kind of no matter how you look at this man. Then you look at Thomas Fisher. You see, what the issue was this. All they had to do was to say that the king was head of the church in England. That of course, that meant you rejected the pope as head of the universal church.
And remember there was precedent for this. You remember, this is the sixteenth century. Council Trent hadn't taken place yet. Of the entire hierarchy of England, only one man refused to take that oath, and that was John Fisher. Only one.
All the rest of the bishops did it. And missus Moore, the second missus Moore, this was her argument to to Thomas that he was that he was out of his cotton picking head. He was crazy. That every good and decent Catholic in England practically took the took the oath of supremacy or agreed to it. Why should he be so different?
Why should he be so just downright stubborn? Why should he be so inconsiderate? Because remember, King could have claimed every single thing that Moore owned, including his property and everything that missus Moore and the children depended on. So, now my point is this, yesterday I stressed let me go back. A couple of years ago, a Frenchman wrote a book called Personal Religion, This was forty years ago.
We are are beginning to forget that, that worship of God. True religion is personal. There is no such thing as community. It's all you have in a community is a group, a collectivity of persons. And it's what they offer individually that matters.
There's no there's no concrete reality of society. The only reality is the reality of individual human beings. Autonomous, as the holy father repeatedly says, irreplaceable human beings individually. Individually, we're born. And let me tell you folks, individually, you die, including little old me.
We lie individually, personally, on our own deathbed. Whether that be a bed in a rectory or a bed in Garrett Park House or whether it be in the Tower Of London in the sixteenth century. These men were solitary. Nobody came to praise them. Nobody came to give Fisher a pat on the back and said, look, John, you're doing just fine.
On the contrary, they looked upon as crazy people, as crackpots, as extremists, as fanatics. It was John Thomas Moore up in his looking down into the courtyard of the tower saw John Fisher taken away. He also saw a handful of Carthusian monks who had refused to take the oath of supremacy. That's all that's all we know in the whole of England that were put to the test. He saw them led away to horrible deaths because it was the death of treason.
More escaped it because Henry the eighth was his very good and deep friend. So, instead of torturing him and putting him through all the the repulsive beyond words, passion, pain, and suffering that he could have put on him, as as Fisher and the Carthusian monks suffered, he very delicately allowed his head only to be cut off, which was very considerate of Henry the eighth. Moore's great and good friend. So up in that tower, Moore was a lonely man looking down on what he knew was going to be his own fate. He had no idea when it was about It could happen the next minute, the next night, the next morning.
He had no idea, but he knew it was certain. He knew it was certain from the day he took his stand in parliament. He knew it for certain. He knew it the day when he left his house and said goodbye to his his very much cherished wife and to his family, and gently closed the gate, and didn't look back. He knew where he was going.
He was a lonely man, a very lonely man. And not let and let us not romanticize this. And that's how we all are before God. In the essence, we are lonely. We are solitary.
We are persons. Not persons on an island completely excluding all other human beings, but it's I who face God. As the holy father says, the irreplaceable you. Irreplaceable you. The thing I I I what if you could say, what just what English adjective would you put on Moore and Fisher?
I think the only word only one that comes to my mind is integrity. Integrity. It's a good Latin word which means to hold together in its totality. Not the totality of a lot of discrete and separate pieces that you pull together physically and just sort of like you put a bunch of eggs in a basket or something, but where of many things you make a whole. A whole, an integral, integrity.
Moore had that. And if there's any example of a man who faces up to God, who understands his position with God as a human being who has to work out with God's grace his own salvation, and at the same time being part of society in all aspects, it was certainly Thomas Moore. Certainly Thomas Moore. It's the man that when even the king came to visit him in his house at Chelsea, found him in his own little bower out in the garden, praying to God alone. In the name of the father, and the son, and the holy spirit.
Amen.