HAVING the head of St Thomas More head deteriorating in a vault is not good enough for the multitudes worldwide who venerate him. This is the conclusion of the PCC of St Dunstan’s, Canterbury, in a statement read out to congregations last week on the 490th anniversary of the saint’s death.

With the quincentenary in mind, and subject to receiving all the right permissions, the PCC has agreed to exhume and conserve the relic, which will take several years to dry out and stabilise. The parish is now canvassing opinion on the relic’s future.

The head was retrieved by More’s daughter, Margaret Roper, after his execution at the Tower of London, and placed in the Roper family’s vault at St Dunstan’s. It is the only remaining definable relic, and visitors and pilgrims come regularly to venerate it.

Sir Thomas More (1478-1535) was King Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor from 1529 until 1532. He opposed both the annulment of the King’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon and the Act of Supremacy. Found guilty of treason, he was executed in July 1535. Pope Pius XI canonised More as a martyr in 1935 and set 22 June as his feast. In Common Worship, he and John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, have a joint commemoration as “Reformation Martyrs”, on 6 July. There is a statue of More outside Chelsea Old Church in London, near his former home.

“Whether we admire Thomas More or not — he’s here, he’s staying here and we need to consider our ecumenical responsibility,” a churchwarden, Sue Palmer, said. “He isn’t just ours.

“For conservation purposes, we know the skull is very fragmentary. There’s not a lot there that is definable. We would like to explore properly conserving it. Afterwards, it could just go back into the vault, or we can have something tangible above ground, a reliquary in some sort of shrine or carved stone pillar in the Roper Chapel, maybe, which is what many of our visitors have requested.”

The vault was last opened in 1997, in the living memory of some present members of the congregation. Financial help for the project would be sought from More devotees, pilgrims, and scholars worldwide, the parish said. The initial stages of opening and closing, exhumation, and preservation, are estimated to cost about £50,000.

The many pilgrims to St Dunstan’s, which is open daily, include organised groups, individuals, and people walking the North Downs Way. The Augustine Camino also runs through Canterbury. “We’re here for everyone, pilgrim, visitor, Christian and non-Christian alike, now and always,” the PCC statement says. “We need to ask God to show us the bigger picture.”