Following is the text of a talk given by Msgr. Peter Vaghi on Friday, Feb. 7, for his First Friday series at Historic St. Patrick Church in Washington, D.C.

On this birthday of St. Thomas More, devoted husband and father, in the presence of this beautiful statue dedicated one year ago this day in this historic church of St. Patrick, I have chosen this morning to speak about this patron saint of lawyers, statesmen and politicians. In the apostolic letter of Oct. 31, 2000, in decreeing More patron of statesmen and politicians, Pope John Paul II describes More as "highly esteemed by everyone for his unfailing moral integrity, sharpness of mind, his open and humorous character and his extraordinary learning." And so he continues to be.

There is for sure so much to say about this "man for all seasons." He has written so much during a remarkable political life, a life capped by his appointment on Oct. 25, 1529, as the first lay person to hold the position of Lord Chancellor, the second most powerful position in England. Not wishing to support Henry VIII’s intention to take control of the Church in England, he resigned that position withdrawing from public life to one of poverty and trial with his family. As a price of his failure to compromise with his own conscience, he ended up imprisoned in the Tower of London from April 1534 until his execution on July 6, 1535. He was convicted after a trial on treason based on perjured evidence. More died on the scaffold rather than bend to the will of Henry VIII, after joking with his executioner that he died "the king’s good servant, but God’s first." Stated simply, his death resulted directly from his belief that no lay ruler could have jurisdiction over the Church of Christ.

I have entitled this meditation: "St. Thomas More: Paradigm of the Moral Life." It is the second in a three part series on the moral life in the midst of our broader series this year on "back to the basics" of our faith. Last month, I spoke of the underlying assumptions of the Christian moral life and next month George Weigel will speak on the gift of sexuality.

I have been referring this year to Weigel’s book on The Truth of Catholicism. * In that book he speaks about St. Thomas More and more specifically he writes critically of Robert Bolt’s play and film about Thomas More entitled "A Man for All Seasons." Weigel argues that Bolt, writing in the 1960s, when existentialism was in fashion, misses a crucial point of More’s life.

He writes quoting the play that "Thomas More did not die for the ‘primacy of conscience,’ if by that we mean the primacy of his autonomous and willful ‘self.’ More died for Christian truth. .....More’s ‘passion for truth...enlightened his conscience’ and taught him the truths for which he died: ‘that man cannot be sundered from God, nor politics from morality.’....To be seized by the power of truth is to be seized not by mere rationality, but by the Truth who is Love. According to Bolt, More ‘found something in himself without which life was valueless and when that was denied him was able to grasp his death.’ That ‘something’ was the truth of God in Christ." (85-86)

You and I know that that truth is not simply a philosophical axiom but it has a name and that name is Jesus. Jesus Christ gives a human face to truth.

Moreover, Jesus did not die to defend his "self." He died out of love, a love which is self-giving not self asserting. That is the Christian kind of love. That is the kind of love which Jesus came to bear witness to by His own life, death and resurrection. It was the kind of love, THE truth about Jesus Christ, which formed Thomas More’s conscience and for which he died a martyr’s death.

It was as if More heard the same voice of Jesus about which we spoke last month, the voice to the rich young man who was asking what good he must do to have eternal life--the quintessential moral question. As a patient and sensitive Teacher, Jesus answers the young man by taking him, as it were, by the hand and leading him step by step to the full truth. He would do the same for you and me. He always does. He continues to do that with us.

In reply, He first speaks of the necessity to recognize God as the "One there is who is good." Then He states: "If you wish to enter into (eternal) life, keep the commandments." To that He adds: "You shall not kill; you shall not commit adultery; you shall not steal; you shall not bear false witness; honor your father and your mother and you shall love your neighbor as yourself."

The young man tells Jesus He has already done all of these. To that, Jesus tells him: "If you wish to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me."

When I speak of "St. Thomas More: Paradigm of the Moral Life," I mean in effect that he followed Jesus Christ. He did precisely what Jesus commanded the rich young man to do. More had an intense spirituality, a spirituality which was beautifully revealed in his last book, a book begun just prior to the time that he entered the Tower of London to prepare for his impending death and finished while in the Tower. It is an incredible book entitled The Sadness of Christ.** It was his last testament written during his final agony. But what it reveals most is his love and knowledge of Christ and His agony. He writes giving advise to others and implicitly himself: "In our agony, remember...His" (45) speaking of the agony of Christ Himself.

The key to understanding Thomas More, the struggle with his conscience and the key to his martyrdom and his moral life, is his meditation on the life of Christ, his following Christ. This book provides insight into the basis of More’s many choices and the ultimate one which earned him the crown of sanctity itself.

In the year and almost three months in the Tower, More had to have struggled with his impending death. It was there, as his final book indicates, that he focused on Christ -- His sadness, His fear, His agony in the garden, His prayer, His patience. Implicitly, More was making Christ’s own preparation for death his own. In this sense, More is the paradigm of moral life for he was following Christ whose very life gives the clear face of morality to each of His followers.

He came to see Christ, for example, as the very prototype and standard-bearer of all the martyrs who would follow Him. Christ was sad. He experienced fear and hesitation. More meditates on the fear of Christ in His agony. And yet he concludes that this witness of Christ, a witness given by St. Paul as well, gives courage to those who would follow Him—implicitly himself.

In the words of More, it is as if Christ would say: "O faint of heart, take courage and do not despair. You are afraid, you are sad, your are stricken with weariness and dread of the torment with which you have been cruelly threatened. Trust me. I conquered the world, and yet I suffered immeasurably more from fear, I was sadder, more afflicted with weariness, more horrified at the prospect of such cruel suffering drawing eagerly nearer and nearer....But you, my timorous and feeble little sheep, be content to have me alone as your shepherd, follow my leadership; if you do not trust yourself, place your trust in me.

See, I am walking ahead of you along this fearful road....take heart and use the sign of my cross to drive away this dread, this sadness, fear , and weariness." (16-17)

These are encouraging words, consoling words which had to have given strength to Thomas More. They should also give strength and encouragement to each of us as we face the challenges in our lives, challenges to our faith, to our Christian way of living, to making the moral choices that confront us each and every day of our lives.

The Tower had to have been a chapel of prayer for St. Thomas More. Again he looks over and over again to Christ for an example. He uses as his paradigm Jesus’ prayer in the garden of Gethsemene. "He fell face down on the earth and prayed." More highlights the humility of Jesus in his prayer posture--falling face down on the ground. "....He threw His whole body face forward and lay prostrate on the ground...." (23)There is a humility to prayer, to persistent prayer, to reverent prayer. God is the subject and object, after all, of our prayer, of all Christian prayer, prayer after the example of Christ Jesus. More writes: "since our Savior Christ saw that nothing is more profitable than prayer....He decided to take this opportunity, on the way to His death, to reinforce His teaching by His words and example..." (23) More also writes: "that when we pray for something without receiving it we should not give up..." (25)

What about our prayer? Is it humble, persevering and persistent? Is it habitual? Are we always aware that it is God to whom we are speaking? Are we aware that it is His presence that we seek? Thomas More, in following the moral command of Jesus to pray, evidences that he understood this only too well.

There is a lengthy section in his book where he speaks of Jesus returning three times to his disciples in the garden and each time finding them asleep. Three times Jesus exhorts them to pray teaching them by words and His own example. Oh how More speaks, as if from personal experience, of the need to be constant in prayer. For him, prayer is extremely necessary -- especially to avoid temptation. Speaking of Peter, he writes that "when sleep kept him from praying and begging for God’s help, he gave an opening to the devil, who not long afterwards used the weakness of Peter’s flesh to blunt the eagerness of his spirit and impelled him to perjure himself by denying Christ." (27)

This would certainly not happen to Thomas More. He would not sign the oath. He would remain faithful to Christ and the Church even to death. He seems to be suggesting that being steadfast in wakefulness and prayer is absolutely essential to being faithful to the Lord. He tells us that Christ "...exhorts us to devote to intense prayer a large part of that very time which most of us usually devote entirely to sleep." (28) He reassures us that prayer works in that "each of our angels will bring us from His Spirit consolation that will give us the strength to persevere in those deeds that will lift us up to heaven." (45)

Do we give quality time to prayer? Do we have a tower of prayer in our lives, a regular prayer and a regular time? Have we experienced consolation in prayer? Prayer helps us discover the will of the Father for us and strengthens us in the resolve to follow that will even if death and persecution are involved. More must have had this in mind when he wrote: "But it must be stressed again and again that no one should pray to escape danger so absolutely that he would not be willing to leave the whole matter up to God, ready in all obedience to endure what God has prepared for him." (37)

Certainly More was willing to accept God’s will as he discerned it-- "the king’s good servant, but God’s first." As if to draw consolation and encouragement from the Lord and His suffering in the garden, More concludes: "but whoever is utterly crushed by feelings of anxiety and fear and is tortured by the fear that he may yield to despair, let him consider this agony of Christ, let him meditate on it constantly and turn it over to his mind, let him drink deep and health-giving draughts of consolation from this spring.....And lest we should be deprived of it by our own dullness, may He Himself because of His own agony deign to help us in ours." (44-45)

More was in the Tower over a year. Patience had to have developed as a virtue, as a way of life for him. It is certainly a fruit of the Holy Spirit, a fruit of regular prayer. He speaks toward the end of the book on the disciples fleeing Jesus from the garden. They abandoned Him. More writes that it is therefore "easy to see how difficult and arduous a virtue patience is." (103) Speaking of the disciples as they abandoned Jesus, More concludes: "While they should have been staying awake and praying that they might not enter into temptation (as Christ so often told them to do), instead they were sleeping and thus gave the tempter an opportunity to weaken their wills with thoughtless drowsiness and make them far more inclined to fight or flee than to bear all with patience." (104)

In the end, More would face death as each of us does. He would mount the scaffold with courage, unwavering hope and even humor. Like Christ, he had to have experienced a certain consolation in following the will of the Father for him. Almost prophetically, he writes about those who are filled with horror and fear at the thought of death but ultimately experience a deep consolation: "Undoubtedly," he writes, "they will feel themselves helped by such consolation as Christ felt, and they will be so refreshed by the spirit of Christ that they will feel their hearts renewed by the dew from heaven...mental strength and courage will replace dread, and finally they will long for the death they had viewed with horror, considering life a sad thing and death a gain, desiring to be dissolved and to be with Christ." (75)

St. Thomas More was clearly in love with Christ. His eyes were fixed on Him. His fears were confronted because He knew that Christ Himself was fearful in His preparation for death and in struggling to discern and do the will of the Father. That had to have been an encouragement for him as it should be for us. It is also clear that regular and persistent prayer was an integral way of life for More in the Tower as it should be for us. A regular habit of prayer helps us discern God’s will continually in our lives and then empowers us to do that will, make those moral choices, to avoid the temptation of the Evil One and to be patience in our effort in between.

There could be no better example of a paradigm of the moral life, a life committed to prayerful discernment of God’s will, even and precisely in fearful and trembling times, and the following of that will, as Christ did till death, than the example of St. Thomas More, a man for all seasons, a saint whose conscience was formed by Christ Himself in the power of the Holy Spirit. He is truely a moral paradigm for our lives in the challenging times in which we find ourselves.

Happy 526th Birthday, St. Thomas More.

*Weigel, George. The Truth of Catholicism New York: HarperCollins, 2001.

**More, Saint Thomas. The Sadness of Christ New Jersey: Scepter Publishers, 1993.