Saint John Fisher

Saint John Fisher was bishop of Rochester, a cardinal, and a martyr. He opposed King Henry VIII when the king sought to annul his marriage and to set himself at the head of the Church in England. The Church remembers him on June 22, the day of his death, together with Saint Thomas More.

He was born in 1469 in Beverley in Yorkshire, into a family of well-to-do merchants, Robert and Agnes. He studied at Cambridge, at Michaelhouse, and at the age of twenty-two, by special permission, he was ordained a priest. He became master of his college, received his doctorate in theology in 1501, and took up the office of vice-chancellor of the university.

Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of King Henry VII, made him her confessor and spiritual director. On his advice she founded Christ’s College and St John’s College at Cambridge. Fisher brought Erasmus of Rotterdam to Cambridge and promoted the study of Greek and Hebrew, which he himself learned as a mature man. From 1504 he was chancellor of the university, and ten years later he received the office for life.

In 1504 Henry VII chose him as bishop of Rochester, and Pope Julius II confirmed him. It was one of the smallest and poorest dioceses in England; Fisher would not exchange it for a richer one and called it his poor spouse. He visited the parishes, the sick, and the poor, while he himself lived in fasting and mortification. By word and pen he fought the errors of Luther.

When Henry VIII began to seek the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, Fisher became the queen’s foremost defender. In 1529, before the court of the papal legates, he declared that no power, human or divine, could dissolve this marriage, and that like John the Baptist he was ready to die in defense of the sanctity of marriage. In 1531, when the clergy had to acknowledge the king as supreme head of the Church in England, it was thanks to him that a reservation was added: as far as the law of Christ allows.

In 1534 he refused an oath that in practice meant rejecting the authority of the pope, and in April he was taken to the Tower of London. In May 1535 Pope Paul III made him a cardinal, and the angry king is said to have declared that Fisher would have no head on which to wear the hat. On June 17 he was condemned for refusing to acknowledge the king as supreme head of the Church. On June 22, 1535, on Tower Hill, he told the crowd that he was dying for the faith of the Catholic Church, asked for prayers that he might persevere, and prayed for the king. He recited the Te Deum and the psalm In te, Domine, speravi, and was beheaded.

Leo XIII beatified him in 1886 together with fifty-three other English martyrs, among them Thomas More. Pius XI canonized them both on May 19, 1935, on the four hundredth anniversary of their martyrdom. The bull of canonization compares John Fisher to John the Baptist, who also gave his life in defense of marriage.