Faith and Family / Sean Gallagher

Sacrifice and service lie at the heart of America in its founding and today

Last month, my wife Cindy and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary. From June 9, 2001, to June 9, 2026, we lived 9,131 days in the sacrament of marriage, a living sign for us, all the faithful and, indeed, all humanity of Christ the bridegroom’s nuptial relationship with his bride, the Church.

As a kind of gift for Cindy and me persevering through so many days of marriage, God in his providence made it possible for us to spend 11 days together in June on a trip to England, a journey that we had dreamed about for years.

Our time in England was more of a pilgrimage than a simple trip. We visited and prayed at many holy places there.

Two of them stand out for me as sites that highlight how God’s grace flows through marriage and family life to help spouses and children grow in holiness.

Both were in Canterbury, where the Church in England was planted by St. Augustine of Canterbury, a Roman Benedictine monk who was sent in 596 to England with other monks by Pope St. Gregory the Great.

We visited Canterbury on June 22, the memorial of St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More, both of whom died as martyrs in 1535 for refusing to affirm that King Henry VIII was supreme head of the Church in England.

More was beheaded on Tower Hill outside of the Tower of London on July 6, 1535. His head was put on a pike and displayed on London Bridge for a month. It should then have been tossed into the River Thames, but More’s beloved daughter, Margaret Roper, gained possession of it and had it buried in the vault of her husband’s family in St. Dunstan Church in Canterbury.

Cindy and I visited the church and prayed on the site where More’s head was buried. Although known for his scholarship and his work as a government leader, More was first a husband and a father, and he sought holiness as much there as he did in his public life.

Just as the grace of the sacrament of marriage helped him grow in holiness, that grace flowed from him to his family, very much including Margaret who remained dedicated to her father throughout his imprisonment in the Tower of London when all of his public glory had been stripped away.

Then, when he died as a traitor (in the eyes of the king) and suffered in death the disgrace of having his severed head displayed for all to see, Margaret still honored her father and saw to it that his head receive an honorable Christian burial. (The rest of his body was put in a common grave in the crypt of a chapel in the Tower of London.)

A couple of miles away from St. Dunstan Church stands St. Martin Church, which Cindy and I also visited on June 22. Parts of it were built more than 1,400 years ago to serve as the private chapel of Queen Bertha of Kent, the Catholic wife from present-day France of the pagan King Aethelbert, who ruled southeastern England from 589 until his death in 616.

It was Aethelbert who received Augustine and his fellow monks in 596. Although wary of the missionaries at first, Aethelbert eventually chose in part through the influence of his Catholic wife Bertha to be baptized. He was the first Anglo-Saxon king to embrace the faith.

One doesn’t have to travel across an ocean to visit holy places. They’re all around us. Think of the life of your marriage and family and identify places where holy things happened: the place where you got engaged; the church where you exchanged your wedding vows; the home or homes where your family lived over the years.

All of these and others are places where God’s grace flowed to make husbands, wives and children holy. And as all sacraments are for the benefit of all the faithful, the grace that was at work in those places also added to the holiness of the Church as a whole.

So, consider you and your family making a pilgrimage to these places to pray and give thanks to God for the grace he poured upon you there. †