Love Rightly

Interesting piece by a well-read man.  Excerpts:

...(Father Edmund Walsh, S. J.) pointed out that an “ancient conflict” has continually raged on the “stage of human affairs.” In the four hundred years since More’s beheading, Walsh remarked, the same drama has taken place in different places and forms. We remember Sir Thomas because of his stature. The two personalities, Henry VIII and More himself, were world significant figures. What they were at odds about was the reality of man’s highest loyalty.

...To the King’s move for absolute authority, the response of More and Fisher was firm rejection. In Walsh’s words: “To all the attractive arguments this world can muster, long life, honor, riches, country estates and town-houses, power and influence, they returned the same answer that Christians in the Coliseum gave to Nero: ‘We cannot and we will not put any man’s favor above the law of God...’”

At the time, Walsh was mainly concerned with the Communist and Nazi systems. In the form of that time, they have had their day. “It is not my function,” Walsh continued, “to discuss from this altar these specific problems at the present time. But it is my function to remind ourselves that, should they arise, we are to draw our strength, our solace, and our light from the same resources which illuminated Thomas More.”

When he was Chancellor of England, More, at morning Mass, “would don the garb of an acolyte and reverently serve the altar.” This service led to the famous quip of the Duke of Norfolk that, as a “parish altar-boy,” he demeaned both the King and his own Office. More saw farther than the Duke. “It cannot,” he replied, “be displeasing to my Lord the King, that I pay homage to the King’s Lord...”