Anglican Identity

Thomas More, Chancellor of England, Martyr (1535)

In the calendars of both the Book of Common Prayer (1962) and the Book of Alternative Services (1985), the Anglican Church of Canada marks July 6th as a commemoration of the death on this day in 1535 of Thomas More. The Prayer Book calls him “Thomas More, Chancellor of England, Martyr”. It is a commemoration that I can greet only with extreme ambivalence, not because I doubt the sanctity of Thomas More, but because our commemoration of his sanctity undermines the very ground on which our Church claims to stand. More was executed for “treason” in that he refused to take an oath affirming the title given by Parliament to Henry VIII, “only supreme head of the Church in England”, a supremacy More held to be:

… directly oppugnant to the laws of God and his holy church, the supreme government of which, or of any part thereof, may no temporal prince presume by any law to take upon him, as rightfully belonging to the See of Rome, a spiritual preeminence by the mouth of our Savior himself, personally present upon the earth, to Saint Peter and his successors, bishops of the same see, by special prerogative granted

Therefore, if Thomas More is a martyr (Greek: “witness”), it is as a witness, not to those truths of our religion to which both Anglicans and Roman Catholics give their assent, but against the claim of the Church of England to be able to continue as truly the Church and as truly Catholic while choosing to be separate from communion with, and obedience to, Rome. Or rather, that More himself could not be obliged to prefer the religious opinions of one part of Christendom to the consent of the whole, as he further argued at his trial:

My lord, for one bishop of your opinion I have a hundred saints of mine; and for one parliament of yours, and God knows of what kind, I have all the General Councils for 1,000 years, and for one kingdom I have France and all the kingdoms of Christendom.

This clarifies More’s opinion. It was not for the papal jurisdiction, per se, that he was content to die, but for his allegiance to the universal assent of catholic Christendom to that jurisdiction as agreeable to God’s will as discerned in scripture and tradition. No one part of the Church could or should, he argued, decide that matter for itself alone, still less vest the authority for such a decision in a single temporal legislature or monarch. As he said on the scaffold, he was “the king’s good servant, but God’s first.”

More’s personal holiness and dedication to his principles, which cost him everything, won the admiration of many, including notable Anglican writers. I will not reproduce here what may be read of his posthumous reputation in the relevant Wikipedia entry and at the Center for Thomas More Studies.

What troubles me, though, is that we commemorate him liturgically. My anxiety has nothing to do with this making him an “Anglican saint” (though he was canonized by the Roman Catholic Church in 1935). As the introduction to the 1962 Prayer Book calendar says:

New names have been added from the ancient calendars, and also from the history of the Anglican Communion, without thereby enrolling or commending such persons as Saints of the Church (p. ix).

The Book of Alternative Services explains the commemoration of saints in its calendar at greater length:

The Church celebrates the victory of Christ in the lives of particular individuals in the commemoration of saints. The calendar of saints’ days varies among the various Christian Churches and among the various Churches of the Anglican Communion. Some saints’ days are of great antiquity and universal observance and take precedence of certain other days. The Calendar also includes the names of a variety of Christians who are remembered for a number of reasons: some inspired the reverent wonder of another time and place; some are associated with the heroic struggle involved in the development of the Church in this country. In addition to those whose names appear in this Calendar, it is appropriate for the Church, , at regional and even local levels, to add the names of Christians whose lives have reflected the mystery of Christ (p. 14).

On this rationale, Thomas More must be understood as included in our calendars because his life “reflected the mystery of Christ” and “inspired the reverent wonder of another time and place”. I have no difficulty in so accepting his commemoration. But what am I to do when I find simultaneously in our calendar the commemoration of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer on March 21 (the date on which he was burned at the stake in 1556, following the ascendance of Mary Tudor to the throne and the restoration of communion with Rome) — the same Cranmer who was the architect of Henry VIII’s first divorce, as well as of the Book of Common Prayer, and who was at least passively content for Thomas More, like hundreds of others who rejected the “new religion”, to be killed. He went to his own death repudiating the pope as “Christ’s enemy, and Antichrist”. And him, too, we commemorate as one whose life “reflected the mystery of Christ”.

The obvious problem is that these men died for two different faiths. Both were, of course, Christians. But what each understood Christianity to entail was rather different. Is it therefore appropriate for both to be commemorated in our calendar? Must we not choose which one was right? The issue is addressed, with specific reference to More and Cranmer, in Michael Perham’s The Communion of Saints (Alcuin Club Collections 62, 1980):

The action of those who appear to promote division must be looked at in terms of their integrity. Did they honestly believe themselves to be doing God’s will? Were they trying to conform to the divine plan? If they were, they were men of integrity and as such they were in a right relationship with God. And Christian sanctity belongs to the man in the right relationship rather than to the man with the right views. It is because of this emphasis on integrity that a calendar of saints can include two men who very fundamentally disagreed. Sometimes it is clear to us, in the light of history, which was right. Sometimes it is not. But even where it is, we are not by that prevented from honouring as a saint the one who was wrong, providing that his relationship with God was a right one. It is this attitude which allows us to consider the inclusion in the calendar of both Thomas Cranmer and Thomas More. The same attitude allowed the English church to recognize as saints both Wilfrid and Chad, who did not see eye to eye at all (pp. 116-17).

What then is the mark of a true saint? Perham continues:

There has to have been about the life of the saint an attractiveness, a sort of magnetic pull, that made people feel that here was a life lived close to God – increasingly close as it went on – and one through which God could disclose himself (p. 117).

There is one level where, of course, Perham is exactly right. God, in his abundant mercy, gives us glimpses of himself in the lives of people who, while they are drawing ever closer to God, are nevertheless insuperably divided from each other, and even at enmity with each other. But there is, I fear, a great danger here. We do well to hope and trust that God sees and judges, not as man sees and judges, but according to the heart, and that men and women who seek to follow him with sincerity and integrity will all find his mercy. Christianity is not, however, a religion of good intentions. We believe in, and teach, objective truth, a truth revealed in the incarnate Word of God. To force these men together in the calendar, when they (unlike Wilfrid and Chad) reached no earthly agreement, is, it seems to me, to make concrete the idea that the truth of our religion doesn’t matter, only our intentions. I cannot help but think of John Henry Newman’s summary of “religious liberalism” in his famous “Biglietto Address”, delivered when he received formal notice that he had been named a Cardinal of the Catholic Church:

Liberalism in religion is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another, and this is the teaching which is gaining substance and force daily. It is inconsistent with any recognition of any religion, as true. It teaches that all are to be tolerated, for all are matters of opinion. Revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste; not an objective fact, not miraculous; and it is the right of each individual to make it say just what strikes his fancy. Devotion is not necessarily founded on faith. Men may go to Protestant Churches and to Catholic, may get good from both and belong to neither. They may fraternise together in spiritual thoughts and feelings, without having any views at all of doctrine in common, or seeing the need of them. Since, then, religion is so personal a peculiarity and so private a possession, we must of necessity ignore it in the intercourse of man with man. If a man puts on a new religion every morning, what is that to you? It is as impertinent to think about a man’s religion as about his sources of income or his management of his family. Religion is in no sense the bond of society.

It strikes me that both Thomas More and Thomas Cranmer would have agreed absolutely with Newman’s analysis. Neither was willing to let his religion be merely a private matter, nor was the age in which they lived likely to let them do so.

Let me not sound controversial. Perhaps we commemorate both these men because we would like to claim them both as ours: the reforming zeal and liturgical genius of Cranmer, and the principled faith and devotion to the Church of More. And perhaps the more mature Anglicanism of the Elizabethan and Caroline periods, eventually enshrined in the 1662 Prayer Book, owes something to them both, seeing that it curbed both the radical theology advocated by Cranmer and the Erastianism opposed by More. These men may be guideposts to the Via Media that Anglicanism tries to walk. For all that, though, I am not easy in my mind on this Commemoration of Thomas More, Martyr. Not least because if one had to choose between these men, I think that More’s “magnetic pull” would be greater. How we may mourn that the English Reformation did not, and for political reasons could not, proceed on principles agreeable to so great a soul.

During my years in Cambridge, I had the precious opportunity to know the late Dr. Mary Berry, who was almost single-handedly responsible for the revival of Gregorian chant in England and  to whom I owe most of what I know about how to sing chant. Her name in religion was Sister Thomas More. Having grown up an Anglican, she converted to Catholicism as a young woman, and in professing as an Augustinian Canoness she took the name of this great English saint, canonized during her teenage years. At his trial for treason, Thomas More concluded his defence with these words:

Like as the blessed apostle Saint Paul, as we read in the Acts of the Apostles, was present and consented to the death of Saint Stephen, and kept their clothes that stoned him to death, and yet be they now twain holy saints in heaven, and shall continue there friends forever: so I verily trust and shall therefore right heartily pray, that though your lordships have now in earth been judges to my condemnation, we may yet hereafter in heaven merrily all meet together to our everlasting salvation.

The cards distributed at Dr. Berry’s requiem mass read: “Pray for me, as I will for thee, that we may merrily meet in heaven.”  It was only at her death that I realized that Dr. Berry, in choosing this name and living by these words, was trying to bring about, in her person, that merry meeting.  I, too, pray for it. And today I repent to consider that heaven may be the only place where such a meeting will be possible.

Meanwhile, on this side of eternity, I wonder if the same Thomas More we commemorate today, who chose death rather than to walk apart from the Church Catholic, might not have something sobering to say to the Anglican Communion about “provincial autonomy”.

Requiem Mass Card for Dr. Mary Berry (Sister Thomas More)