Feast day: January 28
St. Thomas Aquinas
Dominican friar whose Summa Theologiae remains the high-water mark of Catholic theology — faith and reason working as one.
Thomas was born around 1225 at Roccasecca, near Naples, into a noble family with high ambitions for him. When, as a young man, he joined the new and still-suspect order of preaching friars, the Dominicans, his family was so opposed that his brothers seized him on the road and held him prisoner in the family castle for about a year, trying every means — including temptation — to break his resolve. He held firm, and was at last allowed to go.
He studied at Cologne and Paris under St. Albert the Great. Big, quiet, and slow of speech, his fellow students nicknamed him 'the dumb ox' — until Albert, hearing him defend a thesis, declared that the bellowing of this ox would one day be heard around the world. Thomas went on to teach at Paris, Rome, and Naples, and to write with astonishing range and order.
His masterwork, the 'Summa Theologiae,' set out to gather the whole of Christian teaching into a single reasoned structure, holding together faith and reason, Scripture and philosophy, in a way that has shaped Catholic thought ever since. He also composed the great hymns for the feast of Corpus Christi, in which the soaring theologian becomes a tender poet of the Eucharist.
Near the end of his life, after a profound experience during Mass, he laid down his pen and would write no more, saying that all he had written seemed to him 'like straw' compared to what he had seen. He died in 1274 on his way to the Council of Lyon, was canonized in 1323, and is honored as the Angelic Doctor and patron of students, universities, and Catholic schools.
Classmates called him 'the Dumb Ox' for his silence. His teacher St. Albert replied: 'This ox will bellow so loud the whole world will hear him.'
“To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.”
— St. Thomas Aquinas
Image: Carlo Crivelli (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/14663b.htm
Get a story like this every Sunday.