St. Thomas More: A Man for All Seasons
Part One of the Forty Martyrs series
Many of you will be at least somewhat familiar with Sir Thomas More, if only from his classic work Utopia. Readers in the U.K. will, I imagine, be considerably more familiar with him than those in the U.S., given his role in British history. What may come as a surprise to even many Catholics is that Sir Thomas More is also Saint Thomas More.
This is an understandable ignorance, though surely in need of correction. Part of the reason I’m doing this series is because, on the whole, Spanish and Italian saints seem to be far better known than those from Great Britain. In the case of Thomas More, it’s even more astonishing to some that he is a saint, given that he was also a politician. Few politicians today have much hope of earning a similar distinction.
I mentioned in the introduction to this series that I would be including two saints who are not typically included with those the Church designates the “Forty Martyrs of England and Wales;” Thomas More is the first of those two, and by far the most famous of all of them. He was born in London on February 7, 1478, the son of a successful lawyer, and from an early age it was expected that he would follow his father into that profession. He attended St. Anthony’s School and also served as a page to John Morton, who was the…
