Preview: Saint John Fisher on the Son Rise Morning Show

As might be expected, Father Henry Sebastian Bowden dedicates more than one day to the memory of Saint John Fisher, Cardinal Bishop of England in his book Mementoes of the English Martyrs and Confessors. Around the date of his June 22, 1535 beheading Father Bowden includes five:

June 22: Ascending the Steps

June 23: Learning for Life

June 24: The Wedding Garment

June 25: A Martyr's Sleep, and

June 26: The Bones of Elias

On Monday, June 26 on the Son Rise Morning Show, we'll reflect on the memory of Saint John Fisher stopping on the way from the Tower to Tower Hill to open his New Testament and pray for a suitable verse to sustain him before his execution. I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show at my usual time: about 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern: please listen live here and/or listen to the podcast later here!

We should remember that Bishop John Fisher was a brilliant scholarly and a holy man, renowned for both among his peers in England and on the Continent. As the old Dictionary of National Biography explains:

In 1501 he was elected vice-chancellor of [Cambridge] university. We learn from his own statements, as well as from other sources, that the whole academic community was at that time in a singularly lifeless and impoverished state. To rescue it from this condition, by infusing new life into its studies and gaining for it the help of the wealthy, was one of the chief services which Fisher rendered to his age. In 1503 he was appointed by the Countess of Richmond [Margaret Beaufort, Henry VII's mother and Henry VIII's grandmother] to fill the newly founded chair of divinity, which she had instituted for the purpose of providing gratuitous theological instruction in the university; and it appears to have been mainly by his advice that about the same time the countess also founded the Lady Margaret preachership, designed for supplying evangelical instruction of the laity in the surrounding county and elsewhere. The preaching was to be in the vernacular, which had at that period almost fallen into disuse in the pulpit. . . .

Fisher's genuine attachment to learning is shown by the sympathy which he evinced with the new spirit of biblical criticism which had accompanied the Renaissance. It was mainly through his influence that Erasmus was induced to visit Cambridge, and the latter expressly attributes it to his powerful protection that the study of Greek was allowed to go on in the university without active molestation of the kind which it had to encounter at Oxford (Epist. vi. 2). Notwithstanding his advanced years, Fisher himself aspired to become a Greek scholar, and appears to have made some attainments in the language.

Yet as he goes to his death, so weak that he has to carried in a chair, he stops, stands up, leans against a wall and opens his small New Testament book at random, praying:

"O Lord, this is the last time that ever I shall open this book. Let some comfortable place now chance unto me--" and he opens it to John 17:3-4:

"This is everlasting life, that they may know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ Whom Thou hast sent. I have glorified Thee on earth, I have finished the work that Thou gavest me to do."

Having read that he said, "Here is even learning enough for me to my life's end." 

Father Bowden chose Psalm 138:6 for this daily entry: "Thy knowledge is become wonderful to me."

His calmness and readiness for his martyrdom is also demonstrated in his final preparations for his execution: Awakened early the morning of June 22, 1535, he asked to be allowed to sleep a few more hours until 9:00 a.m., the time set for him to die ("A Martyr's Sleep"), and he dressed warmly before he left his cell ("The Wedding Garment"). He was asked not to make any speech on the scaffold and he was content with that.

On the scaffold ("Ascending the Steps"), Father Bowden provides the detail that Saint John Fisher recited another Psalm (33:6): "Come ye to Him and be enlightened, and your faces shall be confounded." He forgave the executioner and removed his gown and tippet (like a stole over his shoulders) and the crowd there to witness his execution was shocked at how emaciated he was because his face was "a mere death's head". His body was left on the scaffold but his head was prepared for exhibition on London Bridge, where it stopped the traffic because his face seemed to look more lifelike! ("The Bones of Elias") Finally his head was dumped into the Thames and replaced by St. Thomas More's.

Speaking of St. Thomas More's head, which was retrieved by his daughter Margaret Roper before it could be dumped into the Thames, there are fears that his skull, a major relic, is deteriorating in the vaults of St. Dunstan's Anglican church in Canterbury. It is buried in the church because the Roper family vault is there and Margaret's husband Will Roper, kept the relic after her death.

Saint John Fisher, pray for us!