Tribute to St. Thomas More

Europe has gone out of Christendom. There are still perhaps Christian nations, whatever this may mean to-day, there is a strong though disunited Christian tradition living in many millions of people and representing, through them, a power of public import still, there is the Church Catholic, and many other forms of “organized religion.” But Europe has gone out of Christendom four hundred years ago. This is not merely another way of saying that the sixteenth century saw the break-up of the formal religious unity it had possessed throughout the Middle Ages. Europe is not merely the name of a continent and a mere factual unit based on the neighbourhood of nations and peoples living within its boundaries. Mr. Christopher Dawson in his admirable work The Making of Europe and others of his books has recovered the true meaning and significance of what Europe has been in the history of mankind—not the natural scene of the lives of peoples like any other similar scene, but Christendom. The religious revolution of the sixteenth century was from the religious and Catholic point of view the gravest event, but it had no less grave accompaniments in fields quite beyond the strictly religious domain. Nor was the Reformation the sole cause—it was in fact just as much an effect. England might never have gone beyond breaking up the ties, with Henry VIII, that bound her up into Christendom, and yet have severed herself from the most living reality of a thousand years of European history.

It was Sir Thomas More who realized that most clearly, “lam not bound, my lord, to confirm my conscience to the counsel of one realm against the general counsel of Christendom,” he said during his trial. In this case it was not the Saint himself that was defendant, it was Christendom.