St. Thomas More: A good or bad role model for lawyers and judges?

St. Thomas More was a British lawyer who served the king. The British crown executed him for treason in 1535, making him a martyr who willingly suffered execution for a personal belief system which put him at odds with the crown. Today, More is many things. Among them, he is the hero of "A Man for All Seasons," the prizewinning play and film. He is also the namesake of the Thomas More Society, to whose chapters thousands of Catholic lawyers and judges belong. Many celebrate More today, and rightly so. There is much to celebrate, including his personal fortitude, which he displayed during his final days of suffering in the Tower of London in 1535.

To me the more interesting discussion is about the reality: More was, charitably put, a mixed bag as a role model for any lawyer or jurist. His misdeeds as well as his achievements carry lessons for lawyers, judges and elected officials today.

More was a cruel persecutor of those who would dare to question the pope or church doctrine. During the 1520s, smugglers imported from Belgium and Germany books considered heretical into England. More's Christian beliefs did not restrain him from the most barbaric measures against them. As lord chancellor, he interrogated heretics; ordered raids on their houses; and consigned them to the Tower of London and other prisons. He "epitomised, in modern terms, the apparatus of the state using its power to crush those attempting to subvert it." (P. Ackroyd, "The Life of St. Thomas More" (Doubleday 1998) at p. 302.) In this way, he was little different than any number of high officials who have abused their fellow citizens in the name of the executive - from Tomás de Torquemada to some others whose names have appeared in the news media in recent times.

As lord chancellor, More played a key role in the torture and burning alive of heretics. Among them were James Bainham, a lawyer who owned forbidden books; Thomas Hitton, a Catholic priest who became an evangelical "runner" of forbidden books; Richard Bayfield, a Benedictine monk-turned-book trader; John Tewkesbery, a London leather-seller whose home harbored banned books; and Thomas Bilney, a heretic who preached the gospel in leperhouses and prisons. Bainham, in his last words, is said to have asked God to forgive More, then prayed "'till the fire took his bowels and his head." (Ackroyd at 307.) The practical difference between such brutal executions and death by stoning in today's Iran seems hard to measure. More's voluminous writings omit the slightest expression of regret over them.

More himself went to the scaffold in 1535 for treason. This was because he refused to accede to the Act of Succession. The Act had ended the jurisdiction and authority of the pope in England and obliged all to take an oath swearing to uphold the Act and obey "alonely" Henry VIII. More's trial was a joke, farcically unfair. In that way, it was likely akin to several trials experienced by men prosecuted while More was lord chancellor.

During his incarceration, everyone but More considered his posture "foolish and futile." (Ackroyd at 363.) The reason was not hard to understand. More's obstinance was not going to stop the Act of Succession. Nor would it restore the pope's authority in England. Nor was it going to spark a coup d'etat against Henry VIII. And so it was pointless. Seen in this way, his obduracy seems little more than an egotistical, if elaborately reasoned, act of dumbness.

Many of us are trained to respect the example of a martyr bravely facing gruesome death for what he or she believes. Perhaps less respectable is the willing desolation of one's wife and children for the sake of a dearly held belief. More knew his family wished him to take the oath, stay alive, and live to a ripe old age. More's wife argued to him that God would look in More's heart rather than to his words in judging his taking of the oath. More's daughter Margaret also begged him to relent. More would hear none of it. He expected to be executed for his defiance of the king, and he was. His death rendered his manors and estates forfeit to the crown, and "apparently impoverished" his household. (Ackroyd at p. 379.) Thus, More deliberately harmed the people to whom he owed the highest duties - his wife and children. Dying for one's family is noble. But deliberately dying in a way that harms, without saving one's family, seems merely cruel and selfish.    

More's many admirers extol conscience as the ultimate guide to human action, and I get it. Conscience has driven many great causes, from abolition of chattel slavery to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Yet conscience, by itself, hardly seems a virtue in history. The Sept. 11 hijackers were religious zealots who followed their consciences, praising Allah in their last moments in the cockpits. John Wilkes Booth, Sirhan Sirhan, and any number of other deluded assassins also followed the dictates of conscience. That conscience motivated them hardly seems laudatory given the results of what they did. Of course, More is no Mohammad Atta or John Wilkes Booth. Yet his motivation seems little different than theirs, in its exalting of conscience over all else.

I wonder whether More, had he had a sounder heart and a less sure conscience, might have chosen differently. Would he have been involved in the persecution of people whose crimes consisted of trading in English-language Bibles? Left his family grief-stricken and bereft? Taken a pointless stand against a law which was a fact of life? More's ardent throng of venerators cannot stand these questions, but there they are. The answers to them are not easy.  

It seems no more fair to criticize More's juristic brutality than to compare his personal bathing habits with today's hygiene standards. This is because English law authorized all the arrests, interrogations, incarcerations, tortures, and executions More inflicted or suffered to be inflicted. Still, Jesus' teachings were the same in 1530 as they are today. One looks in vain to find gospel passages exhorting torture and burning men alive. Whatever the laws in 1530, More knew how to defy the ones he considered un-Christian. More showed this when he himself defied the Act of Succession. Yet when it came to laws warranting torture and immolation of fellow Christians, he cheerfully chose law over civil disobedience. His acts seem no easier to square with a saintly standard than Dick Cheney's or J. Edgar Hoover's.

More is a saint, canonized in 1935. Perhaps reasonable minds can disagree over whether his sacrifice compares well with those of other saints. Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish priest, volunteered at Auschwitz to take the place of a young father condemned to execution. Father Damien DeVeuster, a Belgian priest, died of leprosy contracted while caring for Hawai'ian lepers. There are abundant other examples from secular life. These include the countless sacrifices of U.S. military men and women for their comrades-in-arms and for the civilian population of our country. Compared to their deaths, More's death seems a sort of ego trip - like standing in front of an onrushing freight train to demonstrate moral opposition to rail transport, or throwing soup on the Mona Lisa to protest government inertia in the face of climate change.   

We can learn some things from Thomas More. One of them is this: Sectarian zeal can be dumb and destructive. So, too, can be the abiding conviction that one's conscience, however violent to sense, is the only way. Had Thomas More exalted sense over conscience, he'd have knuckled under to the king. But he also would have lived to fight the king another day - and done lots of other good things too. Having essentially committed suicide, he foreclosed all these possibilities. It makes me, or anyone else who says it out loud, a skunk at any respectable Catholic garden party to say so, but: What a waste.

Alan Dershowitz writes that, in More's time, "truth could be found by the rack and the Star Chamber." Happily, we have better ways of finding truth today. The upcoming feast day of Thomas More is this coming Sunday, June 22. Perhaps it is an apt occasion for using those ways to explore the truth of who More was.