Thomas More and Important, Final Things

 

Thank you, Lisa, for your report about the Thomas More gathering co-hosted and sponsored by the Murphy Institute at Saint Thomas and the excellent University of Dallas Center for Thomas More studies. If I recall correctly, Marc had also posted an entry on this conference earlier in the spring before the gathering convened. Coincidentally during the same period in which the conference was held, I finished reading two books on More and Moreana. In one of them, I came across reference to an essay published in 1961 by the well-known More scholar Father Germain Marc’hadour. Father Marc’hadour investigated in this particular article the topic of More’s obedience. More surely was obedient to the law and civil authorities including Henry VIII; however, his ultimate obedience was to God and His holy Church.

In pursuing this particular study, Marc’hadour made a small digression in his pure study on More to demonstrate how the political difficulties of Thomas More’s time that contest faith in general, and Catholicism in particular, are not restricted to the Tudor era. During that period many good people had to make important decisions and, then, choices about loyalty and fidelity that essentially pitted the civil authority against the Church. But as Marc’hadour and others have demonstrated, this test has not been restricted to that era. I join the ranks of those who do not think that the Church-State issues which confronted Thomas More and his contemporaries were restricted to the sixteenth century. During that period, Catholic England became something else besides a nation that was breaking from Rome; in short, it was transformed into a totalitarian system headed and directed by a well-educated but increasingly despotic monarch. By the 1950s, another Englishman, Christopher Dawson, warned that the twentieth century democracies themselves could mimic the terrors generated by totalitarian states, and here I would include Henry’s England. Following the thought of Dawson, John Paul II noted in the 1990s that a democracy without values is but a thinly disguised totalitarianism.

Apparently Marc’hadour joined the ranks of Christopher Dawson and JPII by penning in 1961 these thoughts (which are quoted in James Monti’s excellent 1997 book, The King’s Good Servant But God’s First):

It may be that the near future will face all of us with the problem of harmonizing, or simply reconciling, our loyalty to Caesar with our loyalty to God… [But Caesar] is no longer a monarch; he is a cabinet or a party… [or] public opinion, which shapes—and is shaped by—the newspapers, the broadcasts, the schools… If we may bring a few examples, there are today fields of conduct, such as divorce, sexual behavior and education, the use of artificial contraceptives, abortion, mercy-killing… and a few more, in which a Catholic, especially if he [or she] is a lawyer, a doctor, a nurse, a teacher, will find himself alone against practically everyone else in [the] profession… As in penal days, the Catholic will sometimes be alone of his species in the whole street… [and] find fellow Catholics ready to taunt him… In extreme cases fidelity to the doctrine of Mother Church will mean worse than corporal death: it will alienate from a man the trust and esteem of the people he likes, or even loves, best… The prospect of this social disqualification, of this civic annihilation… is as strong and effective a pressure as the old forms of physical duress… [T]housands will apostatize simply because they see no rational justification for the Church’s position on a number of points, and they have not enough faith… to cling to her through sheer obedience.

However, Father Marc’hadour did have a remedy to address this problem: it was “the fervent intercession” of Saint Thomas More which “can remedy the sickly reluctance of many tepid Christians.” While Marc’hadour understood how More could be both a “dangerous patron” and a “dangerous friend,” something could be learned from one “who never believed in being carried to heaven on a featherbed.”

Today we find the neuralgic issues identified by Marc’hadour (and new ones such as the meaning of marriage and family) very much with us; moreover, we find those in national, state, provincial, and regional governments strongly pushing the agenda to transform abortion, euthanasia, access to artificial contraception, etcetera into so-called “human rights” issues which no one, especially faithful Catholics, should be able to challenge regardless of the reasons tendered for opposition or objection to these newly discovered “rights”. In addition, we see many in the academy and religious life, including those who use the modifier “Catholic” to self-identify, urging their co-religionists to cast aside the teachings of the Church and accept what are considered to be the more enlightened views of the present age.

But here at the Mirror of Justice, most of our discussions that are pursued and positions which are taken rely upon objective reason to consider, understand, and explain the Church’s teachings on these increasingly controversial topics, which have a bearing on the development of Catholic legal theory. But our discussions on this site really go beyond the important matters that intersect Catholic and any other legal theory—they also address, quite often, the nature of the human person and what our individual and social existence is all about: union with God.

In short, Thomas More understood that the dangerous political and social maelstrom in which he lived and died had to do not only with the civil governance of his time; it also had to do with human destiny, that is, with final things, including the final thing which I have just mentioned. As one goes through More’s vast correspondence and his so-called Tower Writings that he left and which are extant, you can see the mind and soul of the lawyer who was trying to be the good and obedient servant of both God and country. In the eyes of some, he failed in the latter category; but, I think the holders of this view are mistaken. Why? Thomas More understood that there is more about the human condition than the present moment and surviving it as best one can; he realized that the collection of “present moments” is but a prelude to the final things which we must all face. Thus, he used his intelligence and objective reasoning to try and avoid the traps with which the totalitarian king of his day attempted to ensnare him; but while doing this, More never lost sight of the final goal of the human condition and the necessary obedience that must be directed to the Universal Sovereign.

This goal is not about doing well in this world, a world which comes to an end for all of us with our natural or accelerated death; this goal is not about how to make friends and influence people; this goal is not about being the best or most powerful or most influential; this goal is not about getting along with everyone by doing what they are willing to do in order to join them in fellowship. The goal is about getting ready to meet God, and this is the final destiny we all share in common. Thomas More was the better lawyer, father, husband, and member of society for the path he chose. And what about each one of us: which path do we choose? After all, we are all like More because we share the important, final thing, too.

 

RJA sj