Our patron saint was a Yorkshire boy, born at Beverley in 1469. The family were in business with enough money to send him, aged fourteen, to study at Michaelhouse (later absorbed into Trinity). He had a keen desire to learn, gained a doctorate in theology, and stayed on to teach. The great reforming scholar Erasmus wrote to him: "I know how much time you spend in the library which is to you a very paradise".
That didn't make St. John Fisher someone cut off from the real word. Our patron thought that understanding Christianity, making sense of the Bible and the Church's tradition gave insight into what really mattered in life: the choices between good and evil, the forgiveness of God. Such understanding was also an essential training for spreading the Gospel; Fisher had a close hand in the foundation of at least two colleges at Cambridge (Christ's and St. John's) and Erasmus tells us that he saw these colleges as making preachers.

Some of his ideas seem bizarre to us now. His statutes for St. John's required members of the college to talk outside their rooms in only Greek, Latin or Hebrew, but his aim in that statute was not pretension, nor the fostering of academic pride: he wanted to familiarise people with the Biblical languages in which the living word of God was present for them to hear. Christians had to know their Bible - and that takes more than just opening a translation and taking verses out of context. You can't make up your own brand of Christianity by reading the Bible - It's a living faith handed down to us. John Fisher wanted people to know what earlier Christians had thought and how they understood their Bible. To further this teaching he prompted the creation of a new post in the Divinity Faculty, the Lady Margaret chair, of which he was the first holder in 1504. Such knowledge was to inform an active Christian ministry - John Fisher was ordained a priest at the age of twenty two and was later made Bishop of Rochester in Kent.

By the time he became bishop, St. John Fisher had made powerful friends. His career was initially furthered by the support of King Henry VII's mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort and he rose from being a professor of theology to Chancellor of Cambridge University. However, the decisions of Henry VIII in the 1530s that secured total royal control of the English Church forced John Fisher to choose between his standing at court and his commitment to the Catholic Faith. He was confessor to the Queen, Catherine of Aragon, and could not support Henry's marriage to Anne Boleyn. He was unable to accept the King's new claim to authority, nor the corresponding rejection of the Pope's role as St. Peter's successor watching over the unity and faith of the whole Church. Fisher was arrested and confined to the Tower of London, tried and condemned to death. Towards the end of June 1535 at the age of sixty six, so weak and gaunt that he was carried to Tower Hill in a chair, John Fisher climbed the scaffold, slipped off his gown, pardoned the executioner, recited the Te Deum, was blindfolded and then beheaded.

At a time when many saw learning and belonging to the Church as ways to get money and power, St. John Fisher stood for different values. For him, learning was valuable not as a tool to further ambition but as a way to come close to God and to other human beings. In an era where being a bishop ranked you among the powerful and super-rich, St. John Fisher was one of the poorest men in England who gave his possessions freely to those in need. John Fisher teaches us to love the truth and to use the privilege for the good of others.

Gareth Boden