A Man for All Seasons
Pope Pius XI canonised Thomas More in 1935 as a martyr. Pope John Paul II in 2000 declared him the "heavenly Patron of Statesmen and Politicians".
Since 1980, the Church of England has remembered More liturgically as a Reformation martyr.
The Soviet Union honoured him for the purportedly communist attitude toward property rights expressed in Utopia. ("Hailed as a Communist hero by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Karl Kautsky, More's contribution to "the liberation of humankind" is commemorated, at Lenin's suggestion, on a monument erected in 1918 in Aleksandrovsky Garden near the Kremlin." "What was known as the Stele of Freedom or the Obelisk of Revolutionary Thinkers has been dismantled apparently to be reinstalled in some months time as a monument to the Romanov Dynasty. This historically symbolic act was carried out on July 2 completely unannounced… The obelisk was one of the most interesting statues historically and ideologically because of the kind of names that it had on the statue. This was not simply a case of Marx, Engels, Lenin. It was (it seems) the first revolutionary monument to be opened after the revolution of 1917 and, in a non-dogmatic spirit, it included the names of anarchists, reformist socialists and even that of Thomas More.")