EWTN Live - Sir Thomas More - Fr. Mitch Pacwa, S.J. with Dr. Samuel Gregg - 09-08-2010

unlike many government figures in this century Thomas More was a statesman and a saint we'll look to his loyalty to God and the people he served tonight on EWTN live so please stay with us and hopefully a lot of politicians will be watching too thank you thank you welcome I'm father Mitch Pacwa and welcome to EWTN live our chance to bring you guests from all over the world and our guest does come from a pretty distant place in the world though he lives you in the United States now he is here to help us get a better grasp of the mind of st. Thomas more he's the research director for the Acton Institute for the Study of religion and liberty so please welcome dr. Samuel Gregg that's a good welcome thank you it's great to be here good as a matter of fact just to let people know because they'll hear that you're not from Alabama where are you from originally I was born in Australia yeah but now you live up in Michigan I live in Michigan and I work at the Acton Institute great who was Acton Lord Acton was a 19th century English Catholic who wrote a great deal about the relationship between religion on the one hand and Liberty on the other he's often described as one of these historians who never wrote the great book that he always said he would write which was on the history of Liberty but he never wrote it but he's very famous for trying to think about this question of what it means to be free but also bring the forces of freedom into dialogue in the right sense of that word with the with the Catholic faith and so he was a very interesting 19th century figure and he's one of these figures it's not very easy to typecast he's not very easy to fit into a particular type of category but he was a very bright man he spoke something like 15 languages he lived in different countries he was at the first Vatican Council he was one of the observers there and then he ended up as the professor of history at Cambridge University which is where he died in 1902 I believe and you know to be an English Lord who is a Catholic is something of an accomplishment back then it was but he was of course born in Naples because his mother were came from the Dalberg family which is one of the major our Socratic families of Germany at the time so he spent a lot of his life living outside England he went to Oxford and for his university studies but of course he couldn't take his degree from there because he was a Catholic and at that time in history you had to basically sign up to the documents that declared you to be an Anglican if you were going to take your degree at Oxford or Cambridge and of course he couldn't do that so he left know that a lot of folks don't remember that Catholicism was only legalized in England in the 19th century 1829 the Catholic emancipation right all right so so it took a little while for them to catch on about 400 years but we're going to go back to some of the roots of that that's right we want to talk about Sir Thomas More and now st. Thomas More's I started to give us some of your own perspective on his role in the church in England back in the 16th century well Thomas More is one of these fascinating figures I think for for Catholics and other Christians actually because he comes and lives in a particular period of time which is extremely important not just for the history of the church but also for the history of of Europe and the West as a whole because on the one hand he's a scholar of the new Renaissance humanism now Renaissance humanism doesn't mean what we understand today but by secular humanism right Renaissance humanism is essentially a movement in the 16th century to go back to the church fathers people like Augustine and cinturón but also back to some of the Greek thinkers such as Aristotle Plato as well as Latin thinkers such as Cicero the idea was that there was an opportunity to expand knowledge because for much of the medieval period particularly towards the end of the medieval period a lot of the the art of learning had become let's call it hyper scholastic and those intense focus upon scholasticism and at the beginning of existing districts so people understand scholasticism what Christic in particular does that mean scholasticism is a way of learning that's very much associated with the figure of st. Thomas Aquinas and it involves the dialectical method of thinking through particular questions through question answer question answer question our answer format which is extremely we important and useful and it's a great educational tool to use even today the problem at the roundabout the end of the 15th century was that this type of thinking had become somewhat sterile and there were people saying look Thomas Aquinas is a very important figure for the church but there are other people that we should also be looking at so for example Thomas More I think one of the major influences on his thought was Sint Agustin particularly his book the City of God and it was during this period of time that people like Thomas More Erasmus who of course was his great friend John Fisher and other figures decided that a way of renewing the church and I don't mean reforming Reformation I mean renewing the church was to go and look at these people and bring the richness of this past to bear upon the present so it got to the point where by people like John Fisher the Bishop of Rochester actually learned Greek and Hebrew in his mid 40s because he wanted to learn to be able to read these writers in the original languages so that's one level of Thomas More he's this renaissance humanist figure who wrote that famous book called utopia which is that we could do a whole program on that on that particular book so this is emphasis upon new learning and the purpose of learning is not just lot knowledge for its own sake the purpose of learning in this renaissance humanist outlook is to become a better person there could become a more virtuous person so that's one level that's one thing that's going on then in 1517 Thomas More's focus changes and it changes because of the emergence of Martin Luther and the Reformation movement and Thomas More's concerns about what this movement represented in terms of the coherence and and really the stability of what was known then as Christendom which had a real legal political and cultural reality then that simply doesn't have today you know what may be something of a surprise to us but the writings of Luther were printed the printing press was itself barely 60 some years old yes and that this material was printed and spread all over Europe very quickly yes indeed and so he's a Thomas More was able to be in contact with Luther's ideas and books at a very early stage yes that's right in fact most of his writings in terms of sheer volumes of works were mostly writings that were designed to answer the objections are people like Luther and William Tyndale to what Catholicism still stood for and he was basically engaged for a long period of time in polemics with the Protestant reformers during this particular period of history and it's very interesting when you read this because you start to understand when you read through these texts and there's a lot of them that it's not just a concern about where he thought theologically the Reformation was leading Christendom but he was also deeply concerned about what this meant in terms of the relationship between the church in the state the relationship between common law and canon law and he was also deeply concerned about what it meant for people's understanding of what it meant to be a Christian you know one of the things that is very important in understanding this polemic is people were confused you know that there were persuasive arguments on both sides and people began to be swayed one way in the other and this was and wasn't just you know the folks in universities it was the clergy as well as the people and that was one of the concerns that someone like Thomas More would have well he was particularly concerned when it came to Germany and the impact of Lutheran writings there particularly Luther's understanding of the idea of Christian Liberty because in the as a result of these writings it's very clear that you had what was the called the peasants revolt we had a mass uprising of peasants against the established social order and they justified this revolt in the name of Christian liberty in the sense that Christian Liberty was understood to be freedom from all forms of constraint all forms of social order and people like Thomas Moore but also people like Erasmus looked at what was happening inside Germany and said this is what happens when particular ideas get routed and particularly in people's minds and they take a particular course so it wasn't just an abstract theological discussion that was going on there were real live world consequences for the force of these ideas for better and for worse and it wasn't only Thomas More and Erasmus the Catholics who objected to the peasants revolt no losses in two right Luther himself wrote a whole letter to the German princes explaining to them why it was their duty to suppress the revolt and of course they did so in a pretty brutal way but the wider point of course is that these ideas that started coming out of Germany in the in the early sixteenth century had these massive effects when it came to the social order and resulted in massive social upheaval and disorder people being killed property being looted property being destroyed we forget that but we forget that these theological discussions translated into real live political problems that rulers of the time as well as politicians such as Thomas More had to grapple with and try and deal with and one of the things as as well is you know Luther did not countenance anybody disagreeing with him from the Protestant side either I have if another Protestant disagreed with him that person was also wrong Luther set himself up as the pretty much the norm for what's right and what's correct and incorrect well what's interesting is that initially in his early period Luther talked a great deal about liberty of conscience right but once once it became very clear that Lutheranism was becoming ascendant particularly in northern Germany then he pretty much explicitly said that it was the responsibility of the sovereigns because let's forget there's lots of sovereigns in this particular period of time there's not just one there's lots of them in jail there is no one king of Germany there was an emperor right who had only limited power each each Duchy you an each small kingdom like Bavaria was its own independent nation and ruled a particular tribe of Germans rather than the German people that's exactly right and he told them he said you'd is now your sovereign responsibility it's the responsibility of the civil power to basically ensure that everyone follows the Christian faith as it's properly understood and he had a particular understanding of what that was so effectively you see this replication of this this intertwining of state and religious power in this particular period of time so it's not as if somehow the Reformation comes along and then suddenly there's complete Liberty of conscience no that's not the case at all in fact some people would argue that that absolutism the system absolute as government becomes much more plausible both in Protestant and in Roman Catholic countries after the Reformation because is this tremendous focus no longer on christened own which is embraces all of the Western world it's much more about the nation state the modern nation-state and the modern absolutist monarch and which Henry the eighth in some respects is the prototype now that's one of the interesting developments that goes on for Thomas More yes because at first Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher were very much cooperating with Henry the 8th as a young king in defending the faith yes Henry the æther wrote a defense of the seven sacraments in response to Luther's disputation of what was and what was not a sacrament now Henry the 8th was not a stupid man he was in fact a very well-educated man and it's entirely possible that he could have written this this whole defense by himself but it's pretty clear that most of it was drafted by John Fisher and edited by Thomas More and interestingly a copy of this was sent to the Pope in Rome at the time yes and the Pope rewarded the King with the title defender of the faith which is why the English monarch today has the title defender of the faith it's a papal title I don't think many people know that yeah exactly as a matter of fact for any of our viewers are interested they can get copies of King Henry's book on defense of the seven sacraments yes from our religious catalogue and it includes the the letter by Pope Leo the tenth writing back to his calling a defender of the faith and explaining how wonderful a book it was yes that's exactly right and remember was defender of the faith not defender of faith there has been some talk in England about this title being changed to defender of faith well that's pretty vacuous idea because unless you are very clear about what it is the faith is I'm not sure what it is you're supposed to be defending right right and Thomas Moore was very much involved with helping Henry respond because someone like Henry because of the things you've been just talking about would see the rise of Lutheranism in England as a threat to his throne to a certain extent he did the interesting thing about Lutheranism in Britain or at least what let's call them the ideas of the new men this is how they referred to the Navi Ormus the new men the ideas of the new men were pretty much confined to certain sections of the court in Britain certainly certain parts of the City of London as well as parts of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge Lutheranism didn't take off in the same way in in Britain as it had in Germany in fact there are many people who would argue that Britain culturally speaking largely remained a Catholic country up until around about the 1590s it was so much ingrained into the culture and you have to remember of course in that in England you didn't have the types of corruption that had gone on in the church in Germany you didn't have things like the problem with indulgences that you had in Germany in England the clergy was relatively chaste extremely well-educated very well integrated into mainstream English life and they didn't have this background of corruption that had done so much damage to the cause of the Catholic Church in Germany and was one of the things that gave Lutheranism such a strong impetus because it was so obvious that so many clergy in Germany at the time when leaving highly corrupt lives right and whereas in England the monasteries in particular were known for their help for the poor that there were no national no governmental poor houses the monks took care of all the poor right and when of course the monasteries were suppressed by Henry the Eighth essentially as a part of his effort to first of all centralize more control in the power of the state but also to get his hands on the property of the church there was a massive drop in basically what we would call welfare services because all these things had been done by voluntary organisations start by church people and by monasteries as you mentioned so when these were dissolved you suddenly found literally thousands of vagabonds wandering the streets because they had literally nowhere to go interestingly Thomas More spent a certain number of years living in a monastery a confusion monastery in London precisely because these were the type of places that a layperson could go and seriously explore questions of faith seriously develop their spirituality and make decisions about what it was they wanted to do as a vocation now it turned out that he did not go down the road of priesthood he into the state of being a layman but this was quite common for people to do this in this particular point in history yeah as a matter of fact you married I had a how many chill 40 of or children uh and his first wife died Jane Colt died out of relatively early age and one month later he married lady Alice who's made famous of course from a man for all season right right right now st. Thomas rose in the government mm-hm he became an important government official tell us a little bit about that well he was always circling on the periphery of public life because he was a very prominent and successful lawyer in lung he was regularly engaged by the government of the time to conduct legal cases for it and eventually he was called to court because he was recognized for his his great intellectual skills his great writing abilities but also because he was perceived widely perceived to be a man of virtue and then appropriately a man who would do the right thing who would tell the prince what needed to be done rather than tell the prince what he wanted to hear so he moved very steadily up the the level of of what you'd call the government in Britain today he moved very quickly up into the very senior positions and he his he ended up as Lord Chancellor of England which was the most senior legal position in the country but also the most senior political position in the country as well and he was made he was made Chancellor Chancellor in October 15 29 and resigned in May 15 32 now and basically that would be roughly equivalent to the Prime Minister today essentially yes although the difference is that he had is that he had a lot of responsibility for a major part of the workings of the legal system and one of the things he did in that very short period of time was to clear up the backlog of legal cases now keep in mind while he's doing this he's also writing long volumes of texts theological arguments and philosophical arguments against the Lutheran's so how did he do this well he got up at two o'clock in the morning most days spent from two to seven praying and writing and reading and then at seven o'clock he'd go off to Chancellery and do his legal work so this is a man who was fully occupied with everything he was doing fully committed to everything he was doing but it's also very interesting that he never succumbed to the lure of power for its own sake he wasn't prepared to compromise his principles in order to remain in power in fact he wrote a book called the history of King Richard the third and this is a very interesting book because it's a book about how someone can really corrupt a political system not just through their own mission but also because other people around them go along with what's happening it's a very interesting text because he talks about how Richard the third essentially overtakes and takes over the government of England not through money a coup d'etat but rather through persuading people telling people what they want to hear and playing on people's weaknesses so that they will support him so he was always very deeply conscious of the temptations of life in politics he also believed very much in the limits of politics he did not see the state as being the be-all and end-all he saw the state as having a limited role an important role but nonetheless that there were things that the state should not do I think and that's something perhaps is I think is a very important message for today well one of the things about that message is that first of all he had a conscience that was well formed yes that's right let's talk about that a little bit well it's a very that's a very important subject because his understanding of conscience which you find in many of his writings is quite different from the view of conscience that you find portrayed in Robert bolts famous play and man for all seasons well one a wonderful play wonderful movie wonderful films but not exactly representing Thomas More's own thought no because in this in the play the Thomas More character played by Paul Scofield says that the reason he's resisting the king and not giving in to the king why he won't swear to the oath of succession why he won't sign up to the oath of Supremacy he says that it's not that I believe it but rather that I believe it in reality of course the reason why Thomas More in good conscience could not sign up to the things that were being asked of him was that he understood that there were two levels of conscience one is what's called cinder Isis this is a stoic term it comes from the Greek world it means deep in a knowledge of moral truth that's inscribed upon our hearts and Paul talks about this letter to the Romans so it's also a Christian idea and the idea is that on our very reason itself the truth about good and evil is inscribed upon us then a messenger rescind erases then there's conciencia which we most people would understand today as meaning conscience and that is the act of conscience it's the application of these principles to concrete real circumstances and problems which we all find ourselves confronted with so Cinda rhesus would be the principles placed inside of our conscience by God while conciencia is acting out and very concrete way that's right that's exactly right so that's his understanding of conscience now the modern understanding of conscience is very different Cinda rhesus is thrown out the door what you have in place a lot of people don't believe that God has put basic ideas of right and wrong inside the person instead what you find is that people will say things like well I'm acting in good conscience because I'm being true to myself or I'm being authentic or I'm being sincere now the problem with this way of thinking is that what if you are sincere not see or what if you're a sincere communist a person who says that well the Nazi sincerely believes that killing Jews is a good thing right so let's say there are such people well if you take the modern understanding of conscience you can't critique that person because in the end if they're being sincere and authentic to whatever it is that they happen to believe then you can't critique them for it you congratulate them for their sincerity well I mean this is this is it's a real problem because it's not just that it allows evil to be done and conscience becomes a way of liberating ourselves from truth of liberating ourselves some reason but it also speaks to an inability to talk about complex moral questions because if we haven't my truth your truth everyone else is truth then there's no the truth there's nothing we can agree about as a fundamental as fundamentally objectively true in faith and reason in fact there's no ability to even have a discussion about it if I have my truth and you have your truth we have no true between us that we can say this is a starting point for conversation right the other problem of course which is a more long-term problem and I think Thomas Moore understood this was that if you have a relativistic understanding of conscience if you basically have a very subjectivist understanding of the world then that is a short road to tyranny because if there's no truth except there's no truth the thing that comes in to fill the gap is power because what you end up saying is that there's no truth we can argue about there's nothing we can reason about anymore so what matters is who is stronger exactly was the most powerful because what we've done is taken away the very ability to discuss right and wrong right if we everybody has their own truth and then it becomes might makes right because there's no other way to decide right and essentially that's what Thomas More saw happening in England in 15 and 15 30s he saw essentially Parliament the King in Parliament setting itself up as being the ultimate arbiter of what is good and what is evil and even to a certain extent deciding what was authentically Christian and was not authentically Christian and we have the same problem today people will say well the Supreme Court has decided contrary to what the states have done that it's all right to abort a child even though most states voted against it and the people voted against it and they did so on the basis of conscience they create a principle and just decree this to be the case that this is true and they've got the power to undo all the legislation and the discussion that had gone on beforehand so this would be another example in our own times of people just using their position to say this is what we do anyway same thing happen with same-sex marriage over in California the people could vote disgust vote but the court says note we're going to undo it so we have a in the mid in Thomas More's period we have these types of problems starting to manifest themselves and he's very resistant to it because he sees that in the end it's the short road to tyranny and heat so he's also making the point however that there's something above the state there's something above the nation when it comes to understanding what is true and that is the fact that we have the reason the capacity to reason ourselves to understand what is true what is not what is good and what is evil and that's that's something that was starting to be lost sense of in this particular period of time because you have this tremendous emphasis upon my own personal experience my own personal relationship with my god this type of language is starting to seep into the culture of European society this particular period of time and of course as we know we run into this language today we hear people say well me and my god well my response to that is to say well if you're talking about your personal relationship with the divinity okay that's one thing but if you're talking about the idea that you determine who God is what his characteristics are and what he demands of you then you're not worshipping God anymore you're basically worshiping yourself and this is a this is a again another problem because in the end it renders reasons discussion about questions of us such as whether or not there is a God or whether or not there is truth these things become essentially empty discussions because there's nothing left to discuss anymore right well there's also no time to continue on right now I have to take a break but we're going to come back in a couple of minutes and we would like to get some of your questions and your comments as well as those of us to the audience so please stay with us thank you thank you and welcome back uh one of the things I'd like to first all mention to you is it would be a delight to have you come and join us on pilgrimage if you can come and join us here at the studios please contact our pilgrimage Department their number is two zero five two seven one two nine six six that's two zero five two seven one two nine six six or you can go to our website wwlp.com if you go to our library we have a documents library you can also look up Thomas More and you'll find you know just look up Thomas More and you'll see our information and books by him that you can download into your computer for free these books are not so far away that you can't get them these books are available for people to use and read so we urge you to use that website to get to get some of this are you ready for some questions I'm always ready father all right let's go to Mary Ann who's calling in hello Mary Ann I father pocalypse Mary Ann from New York City how are you fine thank you ma'am and what is your question my question is for dr. Gregg and it's with regards to st. Thomas More's feelings about the validity of some of Luther's problems within the church and also if they ever had any personal correspondence between the two oh great question well first of all did they have any correspondence not directly but they wrote in directly to each other in the sense that Thomas More wrote an entire to volume work which is basically called a response to Luther and he wrote it under a pseudonym which was extremely common in this time for people to write under pseudonyms and let's just put it this way it wasn't a a pleasant correspondence because if you read some of the the writings it's it's pretty scatological in the way that some of the things I said and it's it's a pretty in other words they use a lot of bad word one of bad words now this was this was quite common at this particular period of time when people were engaging in in our rigorous dispute ation I think one of the expressions they use was whole ear off because p.m. and it's late at least partly because they really believe that people's souls were at stake that they didn't think that these were just purely academic arguments they really believe that what you believed about the truth had some bearing on your salvation this is why heresy for example was regarded all through Europe at this particular time as such a bad thing because not only was it seen literally legally speaking was regarded as a form of sedition because you essentially were putting yourself outside the law that's how heresy was understood in this period of time but the other thing is that John Fisher used the phrase that the heretics slay the souls of men and what he meant by that was that heresy led not just the heretic destroy but it tempted other people to go down the wrong path when it came to what they believed to be the truth and what the church taught to be the truth so that the discussion that went on between Luther and Thomas More was let's say pretty brutal when Henry the eighth I wrote his defense of the seven sacraments Luther was extremely brutal with him when it came to the his response to to King King Henry so when Thomas More responded under a pseudonym to a to Luther the gloves were off so to speak nonetheless if you read through this these texts and they're very long what you see is a very careful dissection of different claims of some of the early Protestant reformers so for example Luther would talk about Sola scriptura which is a very common Prada sentai dia of the time and and which means that you use only scripture and you don't use the church tradition correct and Moore would say things like well the Bible just didn't fall out of the sky one day scripture that we have today the Canon that we use we believe to be true because the church has said that this is canonical and this is not he was very fond of quoting the lioness and agustin that I would not believe unless I was moved by the authority of the Catholic Church so many of these arguments that were between Luther on the one hand and Thomas Morin and and and some of the Catholics on the others a lot of them came down to on what authority do we believe these things to be true that was one of the central arguments that went on during the Reformation and my guess is that that today most Protestants have moved away considerably from some of the early Protestant expressions of these ideas and that's that's my understanding yeah the denial of the free will would not be much of a hold by many Protestants today anymore there are some solace to them most of them would not would not hold that position today most of them would say that you can make a decision for Christ right like Billy Graham right and that would be much more Catholic position then than say a Lutheran position or Calvinist position where you could not make a decision for Christ according to Luther or Calvin and there are also arguments about the role of the hierarchy the whole idea of apostolic succession ideas so there are some of the broader ecclesiological arguments and there are arguments that had to do with sacramentals as well i mean and these were not light issues and some of the some of the later biographers of thomas moore said things like well why did he write spend so much time writing these big long texts that that apparently didn't change the minds of some people in england well the answer is is because he was convinced that these arguments needed to be dissected piece by piece in the only way you could do that was by taking them seriously and engaging with them so it wasn't enough just to come up with quick sound bites to answer the arguments being produced by the Reformers because let's not forget that too many people in Europe at the time the Reformers arguments were very convincing right there very convincing to a lot of people and what people like Thomas More saying was that well we understand the desire for the sincerity we understand the desire for this radical appreciation of the person of Jesus Christ but none of these things can be known to us without the church that Christ founded and and and and which the Apostles continued in which his successors continued so that that came that was one of the crucial arguments between Moore and many of the Lutheran reformers at this period of time now her other question which was her first question did st. Thomas more besides us in direct dialogue with Luther did st. Thomas More have any comments on the Luther's critiques Luther was critiquing some of the abuses that was going on in the church what did Thomas Moore say abouts these abuses that existed well people like Thomas Moore before the Reformation had been very interested in church reform now by church reform they didn't mean questioning of any fundamental dogmas and doctrines there was not a question of arguing about faith and morals it was a question about inculcating a more virtuous life among the laity about restoring a sense of purity and chastity with the clergy with ensuring that they were better educated laity and better educated clergy also of trying to streamline the process of the workings of the Canon law courts so he was very interested in these types of reforms but when he looked at Luther what he saw was anarchy he saw in his understanding Lutheran some of the other reformers essentially what they were proposing in terms of the way the church was organized the way that the church interacted with the state he basically thought that this would lead to a type of anarchy and he had the example of the revolt of the German peasants is a real live example of what happens when some of these ideas got out of control what was that revolt a lot of people don't know about the German peasants revolt well Luther talked a great deal about this idea of Christian liberté and that you had been freed by by Jesus Christ now what this translated into in the minds of many of the people hearing this in Germany was that all that means we're free of more because Luther was very critical for example of Canon lines so many many Lutheran's and Protestants at the time particularly in Germany took this as a as a way of saying well we need to be free of constraints legal constraints social constraints and that's let's keep in mind that if you're a peasant living in in fifteen sixteenth century Germany life is not particularly pleasant for you so you can understand why this idea of Christian liberty became very quickly transformed into this call for radical change in the social order but not towards it wasn't towards a type of more open a more freer society as we would understand that term it was very much about the destruction of property it was about the breaking down of legal structures it was an end of the rule of law and so this is these are some of the things that that that Thomas Moore via Henry the eighth but also through his own writings actually grappled with very seriously because as a lawyer he was very concerned about what would happen if some of these ideas about law became particularly widespread it was a concern of many of the European monarchs at the time as well sure sure and it was a concern for Luther Luther didn't wanted to go that far all in the end he changed he basically encouraged the German princes to put down the revolt and then spend a lot of time writing about the importance of the sovereign when it came to the body politic and some people have argued that one of the reasons you can see a trajectory between different forms of absolutism in northern Germany in the Scandinavian countries is precisely because of the influence of Lutheranism in these countries we have a question from our studio audience ma'am were you from Memphis great good to have you here what is your question well I was just wondering during the first segment if we're talking about these problems or you know having and I mean we can acknowledge that we have problems but what's what there should the response be then I mean especially according to what would Thomas Moore say I mean what do you do given the fact that that this is the situation we're in okay well that's a good question and the the short response is that we really are not living any new problems the problems that we face in politics that we face in economics that we face in the social order in culture and in the legal order are not really that different today than what they were saying the timer Thomas More because for example there are many people there were many people concerned now and in his time about the expansion of the modern state there are very many including Thomas More he this is one of the reasons he was very concerned about the development of absolutist monarchy with Henry the 8th because he saw it as leading to the to tyranny but what he said was that ok you need a legal system you need a legal system that embodies certain principles that is that is normatively based that a legal system that is not based upon just whatever people happen to want but it embodies principles of natural law but he said ultimately law will only take you so far when it comes to resolving a whole range of social problems he said in the end what you need is a virtuous citizenry and you need a virtuous political class that's why he wrote so much about this issue of how people should behave in political life because he kept saying unless the people who are politicians the people who are members of parliament unless the people who are serving the king are living virtuous lives then that is if they're not doing that then that's likely to translate into all sorts of bad behavior on the part of politicians and of course if the citizen citizenry at this time looks to the nobility looks to the monarchies as models of how to behave so if they're not behaving in a virtuous way you couldn't really expect the citizenry to do so either so I think what Thomas More would say to today's culture would be your problems are the problems that I had to deal with and the answers to a certain extent are in the legal system but more fundamentally there in the moral culture and that we all need to be striving towards living virtuous lives does that mean we'll all the perfect lives no because we know that we human we know available when Oh were fallen we should be constantly striving to be fully human beings to be for men to be for women who don't view virtue as a distraction or somehow constricting but as really the path to human flourishing a society in a culture that embraces that will resolve many of these problems that we're talking about as a matter of fact that the I don't know how much you've read of the founders of the United States but in their own documents they say similar things that the law can only give a certain kind of limit but it requires the people who are moral on the basis of religion in order for the law to really be effective otherwise you have to make laws for every single behavior whereas if people have a moral quality that that again that comes from their faith then they'll bring to this the social situation virtues and you don't need to legislate as much if there's an absence of virtue you have to legislate all the more right and one of the one of the particular problems that I think we have today is that we think that if something is not legislated against then it's okay to do it so for example there's no legislation as far as I know in this country against adultery there's no legislation used to be right there used to be now the but my point is generally this that people think that if something is not illegal then it's okay to do it now the virtuous person understands that we have laws against lying when it comes to for example perjury right but we don't have laws that forbid lying in every single social circumstance why because that would require the state to have such a pervasive influence in role in society that you don't essentially end up in a totalitarian society so we rely upon people living on it slides telling the truth without the threat of coercion behind them and that I think is is one way in which you can very successfully limit the growth of the state but it also puts the onus back on the individual to understand that if I want to live in a free society then I just can't live any particular moral life I have to live a life of virtue the theological virtues and the cardinal virtue and now we're right back to conscience again you know the four measures under conscience based on those principles inside that's right it's interesting you mentioned that formation of conscience because when it came to this issue of Thomas More and his decision about whether or not he would recognize what Henry the eighth was doing particularly with regard to becoming head of the Church of England as well as having his first marriage declared invalid Thomas More spent a lot of time reading talking discussing among his friends the the the morality of the different arguments that were going on in this particular time particularly about the divorce question so it wasn't as if he suddenly said well I'm just opposed to this he spent time thinking through these questions because he realized that if I'm going to come to a informed position if I'm going to inform my conscience about what is the right thing to do here then I need to pay attention to what scripture says I have to read the Church Fathers I have to look at the consistent teaching of the church and I have to look at the facts of the matter as well as a very sort of method methodological approach to thinking through how do I inform my conscience about this particular issue and he came to the conclusion that Henry Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon was indeed valid and that the people who were taking a different position were either acting in bad conscience or simply just didn't see the truth of the matter and it's pretty clear I think if you read his writings that he thought that most of the people who were defending Henry's position were being duplicitous but we have a call that we have Dan on the line hello Dan hi father how are you fine were you from good and coming from Connecticut great yes my question regards Henry yay and the church we're all familiar with Henry's break with the Roman Catholic Church and my question is in few of what's happened over these centuries and reexamination of all the historical factors the circumstances and what we now know but everybody now knows I've often been surprised that the Anglican Church itself hasn't reacts and its own position regarding this how do you feel about it has this helped as far as maybe reconsidering their own position and relation to the Catholic Church or are our things that a status quo with them are they happy with the way things are or do they feel that perhaps the time has come maybe to further of our reconciliation thank you thank you Dan I think there are many different Anglican answers to that particular question it's a good one historically speaking I think there's two things one one very important thing to understand when Henry the eighth broke with Rome he fully understood himself as being a Catholic I think Henry the eighth always thought of himself as being a Catholic to the day that he died he just had no time for this idea of the Bishop of Rome telling him what went on particularly with the the inner workings of the church in his own country as well as the divorce question but I think what you see with Anglicanism is when Elizabeth becomes Queen in the 1550s you see a much more decisive turn then in a much more permanent way towards a smorgasbord of positions within the Anglican Church even under Edward well Edward the 6th took them ed with the 6th took them in much more in a very directly Protestant direction and there was a there's a quite a backlash against that position during the reign of our of Queen Mary so with but with Elizabeth what you see is this movement towards a series of doctrinal positions which people ranging from let's call them anglo-catholics to deeply evangelical Protestants could somehow find themselves accommodating themselves too which is what most people did in this particular period of time so that's a theological reality when it comes to and also to connect with something you said earlier given the the changes she became fairly totalitarian well yes I'd like to remind some of my Protestant friends that more people were cured under Elizabeth's reign far more people killed by under Elizabeth's reign than under the reign of quote/unquote Bloody Mary Tudor Oh far more people were killed and far more about thousands more thousands more were killed but to get back to the the position of the the Anglican Church today I think anyone who would look at the church and say the monarch which she still is the Queen Elizabeth is the Supreme Governor of the Church of England to our ears today that sounds absurd it sounds it's and I think strictly speaking it's an absurd position there's no theological warrant for it there's no scriptural warrant for it there's no tradition warrant for it but what I see at least within the Anglican Communion is I think you see different groups going their own ways effectively you have the the evangelicals going their own way you have a lot of what we call angular Catholics moving much more towards Rome and a lot of it has to do with this idea of the sacraments particularly when it comes to the sacraments of the priesthood and Holy Orders and then of course you have this let's call it this liberal muddle which is pretty much dominant in terms of its control of the the Episcopal Church in the United States in Canada which I suspect in maybe 20 years will be almost non-existent because in the end I think what I think they're grappling with is that there is no real authority that can decide that this is authentic doctrine and this is not because even though they have their Lambeth conference which meets every few years to discuss doctrinal questions that doesn't stop sections of the Anglican Communion just going off and doing their own thing and this I think is very practical example of the importance of papal primacy and I think there are a good number of contemporary Anglicans who recognize they may not agree with it but they understand the institutional significance of it and how it helps to real unity within the church yeah the number of Anglicans has considerably gone down it's less than half the number of Jews living in New York City right you know in this country and it's because of the splitting up and people's people who are Anglican and conscience don't know where to find their home all the time so this is this is a great deal of confusion that's going on in the Anglican Church yes Episcopalian Church yes we have time for a real short question and answer sir were you from Baton Rouge Louisiana great what's your question dr. gray I was wondering if you could give us your thoughts on a current issue I believe it's in the state of Florida with a church that is talking about burning the Quran we have about a minute yes sorry well let me just start by saying I think it's the wrong thing to do right we have in the United States religious liberty it's one of the great gifts of the American Revolution that they decided that this state would not make laws when it came to religion that they would permit free expression of religious belief right now there's always this understanding that people would live by certain moral norms and will not behave in certain ways so my own view is that burning a Koran is a I think disrespectful exact other other people's belief you might disagree with them I'm not a Muslim because I think Islam is wrong on some pretty essential points exact but that doesn't mean that I'm going to somehow go around and try and deliberately insult them so in other words what we find is that if you're going to have authentic religious liberty you really need people who have who are tolerant in the right sense of the word because remember we're tolerant not because we agree with someone but precisely because we disagree with them exactly exactly this is great discussion hopefully you will be back and we'll be able to take a look at utopia or one of the other writings thank you very much my pleasure father and I want to thank all of you may God bless you and keep you cause his face to shine upon you the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit you know and we can you guessed like dr. Gregg and all the other guests to come here because this network is brought to you by you you know we don't do advertising we depend entirely on your support so we're going to ask you to make sure that you keep us in between your gas bill on your electric bill we're still hurting a little bit and we need some more support financially so that we can keep on bringing these programs to you so again keep us between your gas bill your electric bill in your cable bill and we'll be able to pay all of our bills which are pretty considerable these days so god bless you and thank you all very much you

Channel: EWTN

Views: 33,227

Keywords: EWTN, Live, Sir, Thomas, More, Fr, Mitch, Pacwa, SJ, Dr, Samuel, Gregg, Catholic

Id: J9KOhMRjnJ0

Length: 56min 32sec (3392 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 09 2010