This past Friday, January 28th was the Feast Day of one of my Favorite Saints!
He especially was when I was a Student, and he Still is Now.
I remember still being an Agnostic Catholic in University and in spite of that, my Chest would Swell-Up with Pride whenever St. Thomas Aquinas was talked about and studied. Especially in Major Critical Theories. I guess, no, I KNOW I never realized how Influential St. Thomas Aquinas was…I knew he was a Doctor of the Church…but this was University!
I found it hilarious how whenever I spoke, I would always say, “St. Thomas Aquinas,” while others would just say, “Thomas Aquinas.” I guess I was just meant to return to my Blessed Journey of Faith. However, I do think it is more apt to say I never really left. I just didn’t realize what path I was on at the moment.
Unless we question, doubt and seek answers for ourselves…Search for the Truth, how can we ever truly have the Conviction to Practice our Faith. To be Catholics?
I was on the Path of Questioning in order to possess the Desire, the Flame for Christ, and St. Thomas Aquinas was fanning that Flame…
By universal consent, Thomas Aquinas is the preeminent spokesman of the Catholic tradition of reason and of divine revelation. He is one of the great teachers of the medieval Catholic Church, honored with the titles Doctor of the Church and Angelic Doctor.
At five he was given to the Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino in his parents’ hopes that he would choose that way of life and eventually became abbot. In 1239 he was sent to Naples to complete his studies. It was here that he was first attracted to Aristotle’s philosophy.
By 1243, Thomas abandoned his family’s plans for him and joined the Dominicans, much to his mother’s dismay. On her order, Thomas was captured by his brother and kept at home for over a year.
Once free, he went to Paris and then to Cologne, where he finished his studies with Albert the Great. He held two professorships at Paris, lived at the court of Pope Urban IV, directed the Dominican schools at Rome and Viterbo, combated adversaries of the mendicants, as well as the Averroists, and argued with some Franciscans about Aristotelianism.
His greatest contribution to the Catholic Church is his writings. The unity, harmony and continuity of faith and reason, of revealed and natural human knowledge, pervades his writings. One might expect Thomas, as a man of the gospel, to be an ardent defender of revealed truth. But he was broad enough, deep enough, to see the whole natural order as coming from God the Creator, and to see reason as a divine gift to be highly cherished.
The Summa Theologiae, his last and, unfortunately, uncompleted work, deals with the whole of Catholic theology. He stopped work on it after celebrating Mass on December 6, 1273. When asked why he stopped writing, he replied, “I cannot go on…. All that I have written seems to me like so much straw compared to what I have seen and what has been revealed to me.” He died March 7, 1274.
Comment:We can look to Thomas Aquinas as a towering example of Catholicism in the sense of broadness, universality and inclusiveness. We should be determined anew to exercise the divine gift of reason in us, our power to know, learn and understand. At the same time we should thank God for the gift of his revelation, especially in Jesus Christ.
Quote:
“Hence we must say that for the knowledge of any truth whatsoever man needs divine help, that the intellect may be moved by God to its act. But he does not need a new light added to his natural light, in order to know the truth in all things, but only in some that surpasses his natural knowledge” (Summa Theologiae, I-II, 109, 1).
Patron Saint of:
Catholic schools
Colleges
Schools
Students

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