Feast 22 June
Chancellor of England. The king’s good servant, but God’s first.
Sacred art
The portrait kept with St. Thomas More is the image this library has of Thomas. The honour goes to the person, and through the person to God. It is not a machine, and it is not a substitute for the life written below.
Beheaded 1535. Utopia, then the scaffold. Patron of statesmen and of lawyers who still have a line they will not cross.
If it belongs to Thomas, it is here, with a door back into the story.
La Verna, TuscanySeptember 1224
Two years before his death, Francis of Assisi receives the wounds of the Crucified on the mountain of La Verna — the first widely attested stigmata in Catholic history, and the pattern for all later ones.
Bolsena, then Orvieto1263
A Bohemian priest, doubting the Real Presence, sees the Host bleed onto the corporal. Urban IV, then at Orvieto, is shown the linen — and Corpus Christi enters the calendar of the whole Church.
Leżajsk1578
A pious woodcutter, Thomas Michałek, sees Mary in the forest asking for a church. The image of Leżajsk is crowned, the basilica a Bernardine jewel of the Polish baroque, still a working pilgrimage.
Christ the King Church, Vilakkannur, Kerala2013; Holy See, 2025
During Mass on 15 November 2013, a face — bearded, wounded, the Holy Face as the Church has always painted him — appears on the consecrated Host. The Host is reserved in a jeweled monstrance. In 2025 the Holy See allowed the diocese to present the event as a Eucharistic miracle.
