Published June 18, 2025
I’m a sucker for history because it’s a great teacher. And I talk a lot about the Reformation because, while our world today and the world of the Reformation era are very different, they also share some striking similarities: political and social turmoil; big changes in technology that reshape how we learn, think, communicate, work, and believe; and a pattern of ambiguity and battles within the Church. Names from the Reformation era like Thomas More, John Fisher, and Erasmus are widely known. John Colet, priest and scholar, is barely remembered. But I want to focus on Colet here because his love for the Church and her mission speaks directly to our age.
Colet was born in England in 1467. The early 15th century witnessed the chaos of three simultaneous and competing popes. The century was marked throughout by bitter political conflict. And it ended with a corrupt Renaissance papacy.
Colet was ordained a priest in the late 1490s. He began his ministry during the papacy of Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia), one of the worst popes in the 2000-year line. None of this pushed Colet away from the Church. But it did anger him the way the moneychangers angered Christ. Google “John Colet, 1512 sermon” and you’ll be a taken to a homily that he gave to English Church leaders just a few years before Luther posted his 95 theses. Five centuries later, it’s still a stunning critique of corruption, ambition, greed, and indifference among Church leaders, and a barn-burner on the urgent need for Church reform. Nobody listened.
Colet died in 1519, just as Martin Luther was gaining steam in Germany. So he’s sometimes described as a kind of proto-Protestant. But the facts simply don’t support that. He was a friend of More and Fisher, and he had a huge influence on Erasmus. He treasured his priesthood, and very strongly believed that the clergy, despite their human flaws, were absolutely necessary for the saving role of the Church. He had no interest in reimagining doctrines or sacraments. He was a man of humility, fidelity, and Catholic continuity.
So that’s some background. But here’s the real reason I mention Colet.
He had an abiding love for the clarity and zeal of St. Paul. In 1497, barely 30 years old, he gave a series of lectures at Oxford on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. His lectures still have remarkable power. They speak directly to us, here and now.
And here’s why: The Rome that Paul describes in Romans, especially in the first two chapters, is strangely familiar, and rife with recent echoes – the malice, confused sexuality, vanity, and strife. Paul’s purpose in writing to the young Church in Rome was very simple: How should Christians live in such a place, the pagan capital of a pagan empire? Rome at the time was a dominant power in the world, just as America is today. Most first-century Romans viewed Christianity as an ugly superstition. Many saw it as a threat to public order and welfare. And if we think that our modern political leaders are disappointing, the Christians of Rome had Nero.
Colet made a sweeping tour of the letter’s meaning for the Oxford audience. But two points are especially useful for our reflection today.
First, for St. Paul as well as John Colet, we need to live and act wherever God places us in the world, and in the conditions of the times. We can’t hide or wall ourselves off from reality. We’re involved with the world, and we need to deal with it. Christians need to set an example of goodwill, discretion, service, and charity – even to their enemies – for the sake of the unbelieving world around them.
Second, and here I quote from Colet directly: “[It] is from moderation, order, and love that all things are established in beauty.” Colet goes on to stress that “This is what St. Paul here enjoins, that [Rome’s Christians] should be transformed to a new sense and judgment of things; that they should prove and make manifest by their deeds. . .what is good and perfect and well pleasing to God instead of to themselves.”
Colet had a special love for Romans 12, verse 2: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good, and acceptable, and perfect.”
The heart of John Colet’s life and witness, in a time of widespread confusion and deep corruption, was his call to repentance for sin; conversion of heart; and a life of choices and actions that radiate God’s love and the truth of the Gospel. Colet saw this as the only source of enduring reform; the only answer to the crises and failures of his own time; and the essential task of what he called a “divine reformation” of Church and world, beginning again from a personal encounter with the foundations of the Christian faith. And the same applies to the world we have today.
We really don’t want to hear that. The “personal” sounds too small, too slow, too pious. We Americans compulsively think big. It’s in our DNA. We want plans, policies, programs, and committees; the machinery that gets things done. And, of course, these things do all have their place.
But the reason things like “personal conversion” and “personal righteousness” seem so irrelevant to the Really Big Issues of Church and National Life is that nobody really wants to do them. And we don’t do them – I don’t do them – because they’re hard. It’s brutally hard to examine and speak the truth to ourselves; to honestly acknowledge our own sins and hatreds; to repent and convert; to forgive precisely the irritating people whose views and behaviors most offend us.
And yet. . .that’s the task we face if we don’t want to lie when we pray.
Francis X. Maier is a Senior Fellow in the Catholic Studies Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Mr. Maier’s work focuses on the intersection of Christian faith, culture, and public life, with special attention to lay formation and action.
