Preview: Praying for the Intercession of St. John Fisher on the Son Rise Morning Show

As a preparation for the feast of Saints John Fisher and Thomas More, I've been listening to this CD of a Mass featuring the Propers for their Feast (the Introit, Gradual, Alleluia, Offertory, and Communion antiphons), William Byrd's Mass for Four Voices, and four motets, also composed by William Byrd. I purchased it from Aid to the Church in Need UK. It's recorded by Cantores Missae:

1. Introit – Multae tribulationes (chant)
2. Kyrie
3. Gloria
4. Gradual & Alleluia – Accedire ad eum (chant)
5. Credo
6. Offertory – Mirabilis Deus (chant)
7. Motet – O quam gloriosum*
8. Motet – Justorum animae*
9. Sanctus & Benedictus
10. Agnus Dei
11. Communion – Oves meae (chant)
12. Motet – Ego sum panis vivus
13. Motet – Ave verum corpus

I've also been preparing for their feast by arranging a couple of interviews on the Son Rise Morning Show--one on St. John Fisher tomorrow June 22, on their shared feast (the anniversary of his martyrdom in 1535) and one on St. Thomas More on July 6, the anniversary of his martyrdom the same year. We're going to focus on each of them, not just as the great models of faithfulness they were on earth, but also on their heavenly role as intercessors. PLEASE NOTE WELL (N.B.): I'm on the show at an earlier time than usual: 6:20 a.m. Central/7:20 a.m. Eastern. You may listen live here on EWTN or on your local EWTN affiliate.

It's appropriate to intercede with Saint John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, named a Cardinal by Pope Paul III while Fisher was in the Tower of London, for our bishops, archbishops, and cardinal archbishops. 

Years ago, at our annual Midwest Catholic Family Conference here in Wichita, Kansas, a bookstore named for St. John Fisher brought hundreds of books from Jacksonville, Illinois to sell. Each time (many, many times) I bought a book from their booth, I received a holy card with a Prayer for Holy Bishops by St. John Fisher:

Lord, according to Thy promise that the Gospel should be preached throughout the whole world, raise up men fit for such work. The Apostles were but soft and yielding clay till they were baked hard by the fire of the Holy Ghost. So, good Lord, do now in like manner with Thy Church militant, change and make the soft and slippery earth into hard stones. Set in the Thy Church strong and mighty pillars that may suffer and endure great labors--watching, poverty, thirst, hunger, cold and heat--which also shall not fear the threatenings of princes, persecution, neither death, but always persuade and think with themselves to suffer with a good will, slanders, shame, and all kinds of torments, for the glory and laud of Thy Holy Name. By this manner, good Lord, the truth of Thy Gospel shall be preached throughout the world. Therefore, merciful Lord, exercise Thy mercy, show it indeed upon Thy Church. Amen.

According to the holy card, St. John Fisher included this prayer in a sermon he preached in 1508, 27 years before his martyrdom. It was part of his sermon on Psalm 101 in a series on the Seven Penitential Psalms.

It's also appropriate to ask Fisher's intercession for the defense of marriage; he defended the validity of Katherine of Aragon's marriage to Henry VIII, acting as her counselor. Cardinal Wolsey had asked him to study the matter in 1527 and he reported to Wolsey and the king that the declaration of nullity of her previous marriage to Arthur, the Prince of Wales, was indeed valid and that Henry and Katherine were validly, sacramentally, and truly married. Once Fisher had reached that conclusion he never wavered. In the Convocation of Bishops and at the Legatine Court in 1529, he defended his position.

He's also an appropriate patron saint of university administrators and theology professors, because of his efforts at Cambridge and Oxford University to found chairs of divinity with the help of his patron the Lady Margaret Beaufort, Henry VIII's grandmother. Fisher was Chancellor of the University of Cambridge for life in 1514 (until Henry VIII intervened, of course).

Finally, it's indeed appropriate to ask St. John Fisher to intercede for us to remain faithful to Jesus, to live simply, detached from worldly pleasures, and to be attentive to our duties. Throughout his service at Bishop of Rochester he was remarkable at that time for being resident in the diocese, fulfilling his duties as teacher and priest to his people, for his simplicity of living and generosity to the poor.

Saint John Fisher, pray for us!

Archbishop Aquila on More and Fisher

At last someone else--Archbishop Samuel Aquila of Denver--gets the role of St. John Fisher in the conflict over Henry VIII's marriage right. In his article, "Did Thomas More and John Fisher Die for Nothing?" he identifies Bishop Fisher of Rochester as the only bishop who clearly asserted the indissolubility of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon's marriage :

The idea that Catholics should be allowed to remarry and receive communion did not begin with the letter signed by Cardinal Kasper and other members of the German episcopate in 1993. Another country’s episcopate – England’s – pioneered this experiment in Christian doctrine nearly 500 years ago. At stake then was not just whether any Catholic could remarry, but whether the king could, since his wife had not borne him a son.

As with those who advocate for communion for the civilly remarried, the English bishops were uncomfortable with embracing divorce and remarriage outright. Instead, they chose to bend the law to the individual circumstances of the case with which they were confronted, and King Henry VIII was granted an “annulment” — on a fraudulent basis and without the sanction of Rome.

If “heroism is not for the average Christian,” as the German Cardinal Walter Kasper has put it, it certainly wasn’t for the King of England. Instead, issues of personal happiness and the well-being of a country made a strong utilitarian argument for Henry’s divorce. And the King could hardly be bothered to skip communion as the result of an irregular marriage.

England’s Cardinal Wolsey and all the country’s bishops, with the exception of Bishop John Fisher of Rochester, supported the king’s attempt to undo his first – and legitimate – marriage. Like Fisher, Thomas More a layman and the king’s chancellor, also withheld his support. Both were martyred – and later canonized.

In publicly advocating that the king’s marriage was indissoluble, Fisher argued that “this marriage of the king and queen can be dissolved by no power, human or Divine.” For this principle, he said, he was willing to give his life. He continued by noting that John the Baptist saw no way to “die more gloriously than in the cause of marriage,” despite the fact that marriage then “was not so holy at that time as it has now become by the shedding of Christ’s Blood.”

Like Thomas More and John the Baptist, Fisher was beheaded, and like them, he is called “saint.”

Of course, by the time this issue got to Convocation and Parliament, Cardinal Wolsey was dead--William Warham, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was the leader of the Church and the bishops at that crucial stage. 

St. John Fisher versus St. Thomas More?

Dr. Samuel Gregg writes in The Catholic World Report, proposing St. Thomas More as an appropriate patron saint for the current Synod on the Family:

And one saint whose life is particularly relevant for the 2015 Synod on the Family is surely Thomas More. Universally recognized as a scholar, statesman and lawyer, we often forget that More was also a son, father, and husband. Moreover, one of the principles for which More gave his life could not be more pertinent for this Synod’s reflections: the indissolubility of marriage in the face of Henry VIII’s determination to live as man and wife with a lady who, in the Church’s judgment, was not his wife.

I certainly agree with Dr. Gregg's comments about More and marriage and family life:

All of More’s biographers, even the hostile, underline his devotion to his family. The workload assumed by More upon entering the king’s service in 1518 would have broken many people. Yet despite his weighty responsibilities, More organized and helped impart an educational program for his children, including his daughters (a radical step for the time), that would put most of us to shame today. Even when More’s obligations required him to be away from his family for long periods, he engaged in constant correspondence with them, listened to their problems, gave advice and encouragement, and, when necessary, gently reprimanded them.

Above all, More worked to shape his family’s faith and moral character. Living the Christian life and pursuing the virtues was not, to More’s mind, beyond the powers of all but a small heroic group. Though recognizing that self-mastery is difficult, More was firmly convinced that it was, with the aid of grace, a potentially that anyone could actualize.

Nevertheless, I think that More's rather muted opposition to Henry's plans to marry Anne Boleyn with or without the decree of nullity he demanded from the pope, is more complex than Gregg seems to assert. We may rightly assume More's opposition, but he never stated it. He was careful to stay out of the King's Great Matter during his time as Chancellor, with Henry's concurrence, but he resigned when Henry took final steps against the papacy in 1532, not against his marriage to Katherine of Aragon. More resigned as Chancellor after Parliament passed the Act in Conditional Restraint of Annates, threatening the pope with the withholding of certain payments if Clement VII did not declare Henry's marriage null and void and after the Submission of the Clergy to Henry VIII as Supreme Head and Governor of the Church ("as far as the law of God allows"). The issues of the marriage and the authority of the pope were intertwined, but More's defense of  this marriage is not so clear as Gregg indicates.

Gregg states that the Oath of Succession contained language affirming the invalidity of Henry's first marriage. It does not, although the Act of Succession certainly did. The text of the oath:

'Ye shall swear to bear faith, truth, and obedience alonely to the king's majesty, and to his heirs of his body of his most dear and entirely beloved lawful wife Queen Anne, begotten and to be begotten, and further to the heirs of our said sovereign lord according to the limitation in the statute made for surety of his succession in the crown of this realm, mentioned and contained, and not to any other within this realm, for foreign authority or potentate: and in case any oath be made, or has been made, by you, to any person or persons, that then ye [are] to repute the same as vain and annihilate; and that, to your cunning, wit, and uttermost of your power, without guile, fraud, or other undue means, you shall observe, keep, maintain, and defend the said Act of Accession, and all the whole effects and contents thereof, and all other Acts and statutes made in confirmation, or for the execution of the same, or of anything therein contained; and this ye shall do against all manner of persons, of what estate, dignity, degree, or condition soever they be, and in no wise do or attempt, nor to your power suffer to be done or attempted, directly or indirectly, any thing or things privily or apartly to the let, hindrance, damage, or derogation thereof, or of any part of the same, by any manner of means, or for any manner of pretence; so help you God, all saints, and the holy Evangelists.'

Finally, at trial under the Treason Act, More's focus was all on the Royal Supremacy over the Church in England, not the marriage of Henry to Anne or the validity of the marriage of Henry to Katherine. 

I dissent from Gregg's overall thesis only because I think that he should have chosen St. John Fisher as the patron saint for the synod for his defense of the Church's teaching on sacramental marriage. Along with the Observant Franciscans of Greenwich and three of Katherine of Aragon's confessors and chaplains, the Bishop of Rochester was the most open opponent of Henry's marital plans. Alone among the bishops of England, he upheld the validity of Katherine's marriage to Henry from the beginning and counselled her, as this article by Thomas McGovern narrates:

Fisher, after careful study of the Fathers and Sacred Scripture replied that he was thoroughly convinced there was no prohibition against such a marriage. From that time until Henry's attempted marriage to Anne Boleyn (January 1533) Fisher used every opportunity to defend Queen Catherine's cause in his preaching and in writing.

By 1525 Catherine was forty years of age; she had presented Henry with one daughter, the future Queen Mary, but with no male heir. There had been several stillbirths and it now seemed unlikely that Henry could expect a son to succeed him. At some stage Henry became aware of the text of Leviticus: "He that marries his brother's wife does an unlawful thing . . . they shall be without children."and thus felt he had grounds to question the validity of his marriage to Catherine, who had previously been married to Arthur, his elder brother. The king claimed that it was his concern for a legitimate male heir that first caused him to take the text seriously, but subsequent events were strongly to suggest that it was his passion for Anne Boleyn, one of Catherine's ladies-in-waiting, which was the determining factor in Henry's newly acquired concern for biblical exegesis.

About September 1527 the king consulted Fisher personally about his "great matter." The bishop of Rochester told him that there wasn't the slightest doubt about the validity of his marriage, and that he was prepared to defend this view against all comers. Seven years later, when he was imprisoned in the Tower of London, in reply to a question about the number of books he had written concerning the king's marriage and divorce, he replied: "I am not certain how many, but I can recall seven or eight that I have written. The matter was so serious both on account of the importance of the persons it concerned, and the express command of the king, that I gave more labour and diligence to seeking out the truth lest I should fail him and others, than I ever gave to any other matter." He fulfilled his responsibilities to his king, yet he never reneged on his support for Catherine; he consistently spoke out in her defense even though he knew well that such a stance was fraught with dangerous consequences. 

His continuing efforts to defend the validity of marriage at the Papal Legatine Court in 1529, even stating that he was willing like St. John the Baptist to die, make St. John Fisher a more cogent choice for patron saint of the Synod being held in Rome.

Further, I think that his position as bishop makes him the better patron saint of a Synod of Bishops. Although he was not able in his own day able to persuade the Convocation of Bishops to stand firm against Henry and Cromwell, perhaps his intercession today will lead the cardinals and bishops to uphold what the Church has taught throughout the centuries, as Fisher stated before Henry VIII at the Legatine Court: "Whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder." He did manage to unite his brother bishops to limit Henry's supremacy under God's law, but he was ill when Convocation was meeting in 1532 and even though the bishops contacted him, they did not follow his advice.

But since these two saints should not be opposed to one another in any way, rather than proposing that St. John Fisher is the better patron for the Synod, I would say that he and St. Thomas More, as they are joined in memory on the Church's calendar of saints, should also be patrons together!

St. John Fisher's prayer for holy bishops from a 1508 sermon preached during the reign of Henry VII:

Lord, according to Your promise that the Gospel should be preached throughout the whole world, raise up men fit for such work. The Apostles were but soft and yielding clay till they were baked hard by the fire of the Holy Ghost.

So, good Lord, do now in like manner again with Thy Church militant; change and make the soft and slippery earth into hard stones; set in Thy Church strong and mighty pillars that may suffer and endure great labours, watching, poverty, thirst, hunger, cold and heat; which also shall not fear the threatenings of princes, persecution, neither death but always persuade and think with themselves to suffer with a good will, slanders, shame, and all kinds of torments, for the glory and laud of Thy Holy Name. By this manner, good Lord, the truth of Thy Gospel shall be preached throughout all the world.

Therefore, merciful Lord, exercise Thy mercy, show it indeed upon Thy Church. Amen.