Somewhere between New Hampshire and November, American Catholics enter an increasingly complicated conversation with their fellow citizens. Navigating contests of “powerful interests, partisan attacks, sound bites, and media hype,” Catholics seek guidance from their Church in creating “a different kind of political engagement: one shaped by the moral convictions of well-formed consciences and focused on the dignity of every human being, the pursuit of the common good, and the protection of the weak and the vulnerable.”[1] But conscience formation begins long before faithful citizens find their updated voting guides and issue scorecards. It begins with an invitation, and an act of discipleship, and communion. Faithful citizenship begins with Jesus Christ.
Because discipleship involves discipling. Not an abstract doctrinal guide or behavioral code, but a person. The person of Jesus Christ. In his masterful essay Conscience and Truth, then-Cardinal Ratzinger wrote that Christians receive in “their foundational encounter with the Lord in baptism and the Eucharist” what Jesus gave the disciples in their “original encounter” with him: “the new anamnesis of faith,” the Christian memory.[2] Not “a factual omniscience,” but the “love of God . . . constitutively established in us as the capacity and necessity of our rational nature.”[3]
Our Chapel’s patron knew this well. St. Thomas More was an exceptional lawyer and an honest jurist, esteemed throughout England for his wit and wisdom well before his elevation as Lord High Chancellor of the Realm. More’s apprenticeship within the English Inns of Court (upon which Yale Law School was modeled) made him powerful. But his discipleship of Jesus Christ made him a saint. We see this best in the dramatic encounter between Thomas More and the Duke of Norfolk—found urging More to take the “Oath of Supremacy,” effectively overturning his conscientious opposition to Henry VIII’s divorce—from Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons:
MORE: What’s to be done then?
NORFOLK: (With deep appeal) Give in.
MORE: (Gently) I can’t give in, Howard - (A smile) You might as well advise a man to change the color of his eyes. I can’t. Our friendship’s more mutable than that.
NORFOLK: Oh, that’s immutable, is it? The one fixed point in a world of changing friendships is that Thomas More will not give in!
MORE: (Urgent to explain) To me it has to be, for that’s myself! Affection goes as deep in me as you think, but only God is love right through, Howard; and that’s my self.[4]
Anamnesis of the Creator, of God who “is love right through,” allowed More to claim God’s love as his essence: “I will not give in because I oppose it – I do – not my pride, not my spleen, nor any other of my appetites but I do - I!.”[5] Such a love is known, and grown into, through remembrance of Christ.[6]
Christ, given to us in Word and Sacrament, known through our sharing in the community of his body, the Church. It’s an “anamnesis of the new ‘we,’ our incorporation into Christ (one body, that is, one ‘I’ with him).”[7] In our Church and in our world, we learn to do all things in memory of Christ. Not you or me, but we, the Body of Christ remembering its Head—the “we” that includes the widow, the orphan, the migrant, the beggar, the prisoner, the infant, the elder, the worker.
To come to see myself as Christ in this way, to allow the love of Christ to inhabit the whole of my reality—“all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will”—such vision changes everything.[8] My relationships, my desires, my thoughts, words, and actions. Even the way I vote. Because I have allowed Christ’s charity to “animate” the entirety of my life, including my political activity.[9] I “come to believe in God’s love,” expressing “the fundamental decision of [my] life,” trusting all the while that my being Christian “is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives [my] life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”[10] I open myself to becoming Hopkins’ “just man [who] justices / Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces; / Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is – / Christ.”[11]
The just man justices. And so, Thomas More. Where images abound of powerful men holding sacred texts for show, we can return to our saintly patron, whose every image depicts him holding that Book of Hours with which he prayed during his final days. And we can offer to God those words inscribed therein (preserved for our contemplation at Yale’s Beinecke Library):
Give me Thy grace, good Lord:
To set the world at naught;
To set my mind fast upon Thee,
And not to hang upon the blast of men’s mouths . . .
Gladly to be thinking of God,
Piteously to call for His help;
To lean unto the comfort of God,
Busily to labor to love Him . . .
Saint Thomas More. Patron of Lawyers, Politicians, and our beloved Chapel. Pray for us.
Join us for a live streamed Mass on June 22, 2020 at 1pm in honor of St. Thomas More's Feast Day. https://stm.yale.edu/youtubelive-mass
[1] U.S. Conf. Of Cath. Bishops, Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship: A Call to Political Responsibility 15 (2015).
[2] Joseph Ratzinger, “Conscience and Truth,” in On Conscience: Two Essays by Joseph Ratzinger, ed. Edward J. Furton et. al. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007), 35.
[3] Ratzinger, “Conscience and Truth,” 31, 35.
[4] Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons (New York: Vintage, 1960), 120-124.
[5] Bolt, Man for All Seasons, 120-124.
[6] Ratzinger, “Conscience and Truth,” 35.
[7] Ratzinger, “Conscience and Truth,” 35.
[8] From the traditional “Suscipe Prayer” of St. Ignatius of Loyola (“Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will, all I have and call my own. You have given all to me. To you, Lord, I return it. Everything is yours; do with it what you will. Give me only your love and your grace, that is enough for me.”).
[9] Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est 29 (2005).
[10] Id. at 1.
[11] Gerard Manley Hopkins, God’s Grandeur, in Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose 27, 27 (W.H. Gardner ed., Penguin Classics 1985) (1877).
