St. Thomas More

The following are excerpts from The Spirituality of Saint Thomas More: A Summary by James Monti, from the June issue of the Magnificat.

On the Holy Eucharist:

Now when we have received our Lord and have him in our body, let us not then let him alone, and get us forth about other things, and look no more unto him...but let all our business be about him. Let us by devout prayer talk to him, by devout meditation talk with him. Let us say with the prophet...'I will hear what our Lord will speak within me.'"

On the Reserved Eucharist:

...just as God supported the Israelites in their earthly pilgrimage by "walking with them in the cloud by day and in the pillar of fire by night," so much more does he now "assist and comfort us with the continual presence of his precious Body in the Holy Sacrament."

On death:

He stresses the remembrance of death as a medicine for the soul, prescribed for us by God, "The Divine Physician" as an antidote to the false allurements of sin and earthly pleasure.

On devotion to the Sacred Heart:

..."think on his precious Heart carved in twain." He sees Christ's love manifested at the Last Supper as a revelation of "his wonderful loving Heart."

On devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary:

In his last work The Sadness of Christ, St. Thomas More names among the greatest of our Lord's mental sufferings in Gethsemane the thought of "the ineffable grief of his beloved Mother."

In his Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation, St. Thomas More writes of the souls in purgatory receiving comfort from the Blessed Mother.

On the vocation of Marriage:

"Saint Paul here (Eph 5:25-27) exhorteth men to love their wives, so tenderly that they should be of the mind, that to bring them to heaven they could find in their hearts to die for them, as Christ hath died for Christian people to bring them to heaven, and that men, to that intent that they may bring their wives to the glorious bliss of heaven, shoudl here bring them well up in faith, in hope and charity, and in good works, like as God hath washed his Church of all Christian people..."

On fatherhood (from a letter to his children):

"It is not so strange that I love you with my whole heart, for being a father is not a tie which can be ignored. Nature in her wisdom has attached the parent to the child and bound their minds together with a Herculean knot...Ah, brutal and unworthy to be called father is he who does not himself weep at the tears of his child...But now my love has grown so much that it seems to me I did not love you at all before."

On prayer and meditation in our own home:

"Let him also choose himself some secret solitary place in his own house as far from noise and company as he conveniently can. And thither let him some time secretly resort alone, imagining himself as one going out of the world even straight unto the giving up his reckoning unto God of his sinful living. Then let him there before an altar or some pitiful image of Christ's bitter Passion, the beholding whereof may put him in remembrance of the thing and move him to devout compassion, kneel down or fall prostrate as at the feet of almighty God, verily believing him to be there invisibly present as without any doubt he is. There let him open his heart go God, and confess his faults such as he can call to mind and pray God of forgiveness. Let him call to remembrance the benefits that God hath given him, either in general among other men, or privately to himself, and give him humble hearty thanks therefore. There let him declare unto God the temptations of the devil, the suggestions of the flesh, the occasions of the world, and of his worldy friends much worse many times in drawing a man from God than are his most mortal enemies."

On his lifelong quest for heaven:

"Make us saved souls in heaven together."