St. John Fisher, Bishop

St. John Fisher was born in 1469 and became Bishop of Rochester in 1504. He had a close association with the University of Cambridge where three colleges were founded under his auspices: St. John’s, Christ College, and Queens’ College. He refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of King Henry VIII’s claim to be the head of the Church in England and refused to sign a document which denied the authority of the Papacy. Sixty-six bishops, abbots and other high-ranking members of the Church signed the document but St. John Fisher refused. He was sent to the Tower of London and after a period of imprisonment he was beheaded at Tower Hill in 1535. Along with St. Thomas More, a lay Catholic lawyer who defended the papacy and who also refused to recognise the ecclesiastical powers which Henry VIII had conferred upon himself, St. John Fisher was canonised in 1935.