Who was St. Thomas More?
Thomas More was born in London on February 7, 1478; the Catholic Encyclopedia gives the year as 1477–78. He went to St. Anthony's School, then at about thirteen into the household of John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor, who saw what he was. Oxford followed, where he learned Greek from Thomas Linacre, then the law at New Inn and Lincoln's Inn. He thought seriously about religious life: the motu proprio of John Paul II records that he lived for a time at the London Charterhouse and kept close to the Observant Franciscans at Greenwich. In the end he chose marriage and the bar.
In 1505 he married Jane Colt. They had four children, Margaret, Elizabeth, Cecily and John. Jane died in 1511, and soon afterward More married Alice Middleton, a widow. Erasmus was his friend; Utopia appeared in 1516. The public career ran alongside: Parliament in 1501, Under-Sheriff of London in 1510, Speaker of the House of Commons in 1523, and in October 1529, when Cardinal Wolsey fell, Lord Chancellor of England, the first layman to hold the office.
He held it for two and a half years. Henry VIII wanted his marriage to Catherine of Aragon ended and, when Rome would not do it, wanted to be head of the Church in England himself. More would approve neither, and in May 1532 he resigned. The Act of Succession of March 1534 required an oath; More refused it on April 14, 1534, and four days later was sent to the Tower of London. He was there fifteen months. Denied pen and ink toward the end, he wrote to his wife and to his daughter Margaret with a piece of charcoal. In the Tower he also wrote A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation, a treatise on the Passion, and the short prayer printed below.
On July 1, 1535, he was tried for treason in Westminster Hall. A contemporary account, a newsletter sent to Paris and dated August 4 of that year, has him tell the court that "the faithful subject is more bound to his conscience and his soul than to anything else in the world," and, after the verdict, that "for one bishop of your opinion I have a hundred saints of mine." He told his judges he hoped to meet them in heaven "in perfect charity." On the way back to the Tower his daughter Margaret broke through the guards and held him. He was beheaded on Tower Hill on July 6, 1535. The Paris newsletter records that he died "protesting that he died his faithful servant, and God's first"; the Center for Thomas More Studies gives the familiar form, "I die the king's good servant, and God's first." Leo XIII beatified him on December 29, 1886; Pius XI canonized him in 1935.
Why Catholics pray to St. Thomas More for work, marriage and family
One of his patronages is formal. On October 31, 2000, John Paul II, in the motu proprio E sancti Thomae Mori, declared him heavenly Patron of Statesmen and Politicians, at the request of heads of state, politicians and bishops' conferences. The letter grounds it in conscience, which it calls, quoting the Second Vatican Council, "the most intimate centre and sanctuary of a person," and in More's witness "to the primacy of truth over power." The patronage of lawyers, civil servants, court clerks and public servants, which Franciscan Media lists, is traditional, and it is obvious: he was one of them.
People in trouble at work go to him because he lost his job for refusing to sign something. A lawyer with a client who wants a lie, an official told to look away, a worker pressed to approve what she knows is wrong, a man waiting years for a court to hear him: these are More's people. Franciscan Media calls him a model of integrity who would not compromise his moral values to please the king, and notes that Henry wanted him precisely because his approval counted.
The marriage and family patronage is traditional and comes from the household. He was a widower who remarried, a father of four who wrote to his wife and to his daughter Margaret with charcoal when they took his pen away, and a condemned man whose daughter pushed through the guards to hold him on the way back to the Tower. Families under strain, blended families, fathers trying to raise children in a culture that pushes the other way, all find him close.
How to pray to St. Thomas More
His day is June 22, an Optional Memorial on the General Roman Calendar, shared with St. John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester. A novena is usually made in the nine days before.
The prayer below is his own, written in the Tower in 1534–35, a list of things to ask for when the world has turned against you; a selection of its petitions is printed here. Pray it slowly; it is a prayer for the long haul, not for a crisis. Then bring the matter to Mass, and, if the trouble at work has tempted you into something you regret, to Confession.
If the trouble is legal, prayer goes with a lawyer. More would be the first to say so. If it is a workplace that is damaging your health, prayer goes with a doctor and, where needed, with leaving. More resigned. He did not wait to be fired.