Again, in his _Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer_, written in 1532 when he was Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More speaks specially about the absolute necessity of the Church being One and not able to teach error. There is one known and recognised Church existing throughout the world, which “is that mystical body be it never so sick.” Of this mystical body “Christ is the principal head”; and it is no part of his concern, he says, for the moment to determine “whether the successor of St. Peter is his vicar-general and head under him, as all Christian nations have now long taken him.”[100] Later on he classes himself with “poor popish men,”[101] and in the fifth book he discusses the question “whether the Pope and his sect” (as Tyndale called them) “is Christ’s Church or no.” On this matter More is perfectly clear. “I call the Church of Christ,” he says, “the known Catholic Church of all Christian nations, neither gone out nor cut off. And although all these nations do now and have long since recognised and acknowledged the Pope, not as the bishop of Rome but as the successor of St. Peter, to be their chief spiritual governor under God and Christ’s Vicar on earth, yet I never put the Pope as part of the definition of the Church, by defining it to be the common known congregation of all Christian nations under one head the Pope.”
I avoided this definition purposely, he continues, so as not “to entangle the matter with the two questions at once, for I knew well that the Church being proved this common known Catholic congregation of all Christian nations abiding together in one faith, neither fallen nor cut off; there might, peradventure, be made a second question after that, whether over all this Catholic Church the Pope must needs be head and chief governor and chief spiritual shepherd, or whether, if the unity of the faith was kept among them all, every province might have its own spiritual chief over itself, without any recourse unto the Pope.…
“For the avoiding of all such intricacies, I purposely abstained from putting the Pope as part of the definition of the Church, as a thing that was not necessary; for if he be the necessary head, he is included in the name of the whole body, and whether he be or not is a matter to be treated and disputed of besides” (p. 615). As to Tyndale’s railing against the authority of the Pope because there have been “Popes that have evil played their parts,” he should remember, says More, that “there have been Popes again right holy men, saints and martyrs too,” and that, moreover, the personal question of goodness or badness has nothing to say to the office.[102]