Church of England weighs proposal to place St. Thomas More's skull in shrine for veneration

LIVERPOOL, England (OSV News) -- The Church of England is weighing plans to exhume and enshrine the head of St. Thomas More , the patron saint of statesmen and politicians, in time for the 500th anniversary of his 1535 martyrdom.

Years after his beheading, the saint's head was buried in a vault with the body of his daughter, Margaret Roper, at St. Dunstan's Anglican Church in the city of Canterbury in the southeast of England.

The parochial church council, or PCC, has announced that it wants to exhume the skull so it can be venerated by pilgrims.

A statement read to parishioners on July 6, the date of St. Thomas More's martyrdom, said: "What the PCC has agreed, subject to all the right permissions being granted, is to exhume and conserve what remains of the relic, which will take several years to dry out and stabilize.

"We could just put it back in the vault, maybe in a reliquary of some kind, or we could place the reliquary in some sort of shrine or carved stone pillar above ground in the Roper chapel, which is what many of our visitors have requested," the statement said. "We'd really appreciate your ideas and thoughts."

According to The Times, a daily newspaper based in London which broke the story, the church will seek to raise 50,000 pounds, or $67,300, to fund the conservation project with the aim of creating a shrine by 2035.

Among the first steps will be obtaining permission from a commissary court in Canterbury, which issues rulings concerning church buildings and grounds, according to The Times.

More was a lawyer who became one of the most admired statesmen in Europe, gaining international recognition for "Utopia," his satirical work about a perfect state.

He was appointed lord chancellor of England by King Henry VIII in 1529 but resigned in 1532 in opposition to the king's reforms of the Catholic Church in England.

He infuriated the king further by refusing to attend the coronation of Anne Boleyn, the mistress whom Henry had married after Pope Clement VII refused to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, prompting Henry to take the church into schism.

More was committed to the Tower of London after he and St. John Fisher, the bishop of Rochester, refused to take the oath attached to the 1534 Succession to the Crown Act that recognized the progeny of Henry and Anne as the rightful heirs to the English throne.

He was convicted of high treason at a trial in Westminster Hall in London and sentenced to death by being hanged, drawn and quartered, a slow and painful death involving disembowelment.

Henry commuted the sentence to beheading, and on the day of the execution at Tower Hill, London, asked More to keep his final address brief.

St. Thomas More famously protested that he died "in the faith and for the faith" and that he was always the king's good servant -- but God's first.

The future saint's body was buried beneath the altar in the church of St. Peter in Chains at the Tower of London where it remains.

His head, however, was parboiled and placed on a spike on London Bridge, replacing that of Bishop Fisher, who had been beheaded a fortnight earlier on June 22.

More's daughter Margaret -- whom he lovingly called "Meg" -- rescued the head and embalmed it. She was buried with the head following her death in 1544. It was moved with her remains when they were transferred to the Roper family vault more than 30 years later.

More and Fisher were declared martyrs and canonized together in 1935 by Pope Pius XI, and in 2000 St. John Paul II declared St. Thomas More "the heavenly Patron of Statesmen and Politicians."

In a 1991 address, St. Thomas More was described by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, as "Britain's other great witness of conscience" besides St. John Henry Newman.

In June, Pope Leo XIV encouraged politicians to take inspiration from St. Thomas More as a perfect example of a public servant.

The American-born pontiff said during the Jubilee of Governments that he "was a man faithful to his civic responsibilities, a perfect servant of the state precisely because of his faith, which led him to view politics not as a profession but as a mission for the spread of truth and goodness."

Pope Leo said: "The courage he showed by his readiness to sacrifice his life rather than betray the truth makes him, also for us today, a martyr for freedom and for the primacy of conscience."