St John Fisher’s prayer for good bishops
By Liam Gibson | 9 July 2025
This article is slightly adapted from its original form in Calx Mariae magazine (Issue 2, Autumn 2018) to commemorate the ninetieth anniversary of the canonisation of St John Fisher and St Thomas More by Pope Pius XI, who instituted their feast on 9 July.
On the morning of Tuesday 22 June 1535, John Cardinal Fisher was taken from his prison cell and beheaded. His naked body was left on the scaffold all day. Towards night, two soldiers carried it away on pikes and tumbled it into a rough grave. His head was placed on a spike above London Bridge but was soon removed owing to the veneration of the people.
During his life, St John Fisher was recognised as the holiest bishop in England and one of the wisest in Christendom. Had his example been followed, England might have led the Counter-Reformation. Instead, in the country known as Our Lady’s Dowry, images of Mary were burned, shrines desecrated and countless souls led into schism and heresy.
In 1504, Fisher succeeded to the See of Rochester — the poorest diocese in England. Only 35, he was known for his “singular virtue” and his academic brilliance.
The role of bishop weighed heavily with Fisher. In a sermon on Psalm 50, he wrote that “the office of doctor or teacher of God’s laws is no small charge. It is a great jeopardy, where I myself remembering the same am often afraid, for many times I think upon St Paul saying ‘If I teach not the law of God onto the people I shall be damned.'”1
Fisher was tireless in administering the sacraments, instructing the ignorant and working to relieve poverty. He rooted out heresy and corruption in the priesthood.
The same year he became a bishop, Fisher was made Chancellor of Cambridge University and together with Lady Margaret Beaufort, Henry VII’s mother, began its revival as a place of Christian learning. He oversaw construction of Christ’s College and in St John’s College. He pre-empted the seminaries established after the Council of Trent. From Cambridge, Fisher set about evangelising the poor by persuading Lady Margaret to pay for preachers to travel throughout England teaching the Faith.
Writing of the saint, Butler observes that “had Fisher’s timely warning on the subject been attended to, it seems not unlikely that even Henry VIII and his Sejanus, Cromwell, would have been unable to wrest the nation from the faith of its forefathers.”2
As Martin Luther’s heresies began to spread, Fisher’s response was simple and direct, despite his immense learning. In many ways, Fisher was Luther’s antithesis.
Where Luther was vulgar and vitriolic, Fisher based his arguments on scripture and Patristics without resorting to abuse. When Luther denounced the Pope as the Antichrist, Fisher recognised the divine origin of the papacy yet distinguished between the office and the man who occupied it. While Luther saw marriage as a mere civil institution,3 Fisher would lay down his life for the indissolubility of the sacrament. And it was Fisher’s defence of Queen Catherine’s marriage to Henry VIII that earned the enmity of the King. While imprisoned in the Tower of London, Fisher was made a cardinal. On hearing the news Henry raged, “Well, let the pope send him a hat when he will, but I shall so provide that whensoever it cometh, he shall wear it on his shoulders, for head shall he have none to set it on.”4
Condemned to be hung, drawn and quartered, it was feared that Fisher, now frail, would not survive being dragged on a hurdle to the scaffold. The sentence, therefore, was commuted to beheading. Nevertheless, his execution shocked the people.
In an era when bishops fail to defend marriage, the family and life at all its stages, men of the stature of John Cardinal Fisher are needed more than ever. Let us pray, in his words, therefore:
Lord, according to Thy promise that the Gospel should be preached throughout the whole world, raise up men fit for such work. The Apostles were but soft and yielding clay till they were baked hard by the fire of the Holy Ghost.
So, good Lord, do now in like manner again with Thy Church militant; change and make the soft and slippery earth into hard stone; set in Thy Church strong and mighty pillars that may suffer and endure great labours, watching, poverty, thirst, hunger, cold and heat; which also shall not fear the threatening of princes, persecution, neither death but always persuade and think with themselves to suffer with a good will, slanders, shame, and all kinds of torments, for the glory and laud of Thy Holy Name. By this manner, good Lord, the truth of Thy Gospel shall be preached throughout all the world.
Therefore, merciful Lord, exercise Thy mercy, show it indeed upon Thy Church. Amen.
Notes
- St John Fisher, Exposition of the Seven Penitential Psalms, (Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1998) p126-27. ↩︎
- Alban Butler, The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs and Other Principal Saints, vol V, (Virtue, London, 1936) p293. ↩︎
- Luther even condoned bigamy. Philipp, Landgrave of Hesse, was still married to Catherine, daughter of Duke George of Ernestine Saxony when, in 1539, Luther gave him permission to take the 17-year old Margaret von der Saale as an additional wife. ↩︎
- Butler p298. ↩︎