Future ages when chronicling the canonization of Thomas More by Pope Pius XI, on the 19th May, 1935. may perhaps ask their contemporaries to account it a pivotal event in the history of mankind. First of all it is an event in the city of Rome, which some cartographers claim to be the geographical centre of the habitable earth. Moreover it is a solemn and irrevocable nomination to the Peerage of Mankind made by a spiritual sovereign whose native land and whose official metropolis are Italy and Rome. Lastly, it is the strange almost bewildering action of an Italian giving supreme ennoblement to an Englishman beheaded by an English king four hundred years ago.

To those of us who know that Rome is Rome and that Simon Bar-Jona is Peter, because Jesus, Son of Mary, is Son of God, the canonization of an English Lord Chancellor or of a French shepherd-lass or of a South American halfcaste is but the arrival of the expected. Rome either is or is prepared to be the nursing mother of all nations, i.e., of all groups of human beings welded into one by the seemingly opposite forces of authority and liberty. It is not a matter of surprise to us Catholics, therefore, that an Englishman of the English should be given world-wide honour and recognition by the same Italian-centred force which one day sent the Levantine, Augustine of Tarsus, to weld warring settlers into the religious, and incidentally into the political, unity called England.

If at times Alma Mater Ecclesia tried to meet her somewhat spendthrift outgoings by demands upon her children, no accountant would dare to show that she had demanded over-payment for her nursing and teaching cares.