The King's good servant, but God's first

Early in his life, English lawyer, statesman, scholar, and writer Sir Thomas More (7 February 1478 – 6 July 1535) was torn between a monastic life and a life of civil service. He became a Carthusian monk but eventually, his desire to serve his country won out and he entered the field of politics after three years. His thirty-year political career was tumultuous and controversial, and when he refused to swear to the 1534 Act of Succession and Act of Supremacy, which declared King Henry VIII the supreme head of the Church of England, More was tried, found guilty of treason and beheaded. For the same reasons that he was beheaded, Thomas More was canonized as a Catholic saint in 1935 and he is considered the patron of lawyers and politicians. It is therefore not surprising that the chapel in the Ateneo Professional Schools (law, business, government, and medicine and public health) in Makati City is named the Chapel of Saint Thomas More.