Sisters sent to change St. Thomas's mind take his side

MONTE SAN GIOVANNI, the 1240s AD — Saint Thomas Aquinas’s own family kept him locked up for eighteen months to two years. He spent the time reading and studying. He was about nineteen, and it was the early 1240s AD.

As a student in Naples, St. Thomas joined the Dominicans, a new order of friars who begged for their food. His mother, Theodora, was furious that a son of a noble family would dress like a beggar. His older brothers caught him on the road. They shut him in the tower of the family’s castle at Monte San Giovanni. He was to stay there until he gave up being a friar.

The sisters who changed sides

His guards insulted him and gave him nothing to make life easier. His father came now and then to push him to leave the Dominicans, and St. Thomas refused. His mother cried and begged him to give it up. When that didn’t work, the family tried two of his sisters, who came to see him often. They told him he could be famous at court or in the army. Or he could rise high in the Church, they said.

St. Thomas answered his sisters by talking to them about God. The Church’s readings for his feast day say that afterwards both sisters “ever after set no value on earthly things, and busied themselves rather with heavenly.” From then on, they worked to make his time in the tower easier.

The elder sister, Marietta, later became a nun. She died as abbess, the nun in charge, of St. Mary’s convent at Capua. The younger sister was named Theodora, like their mother. She later became Countess of Marsico and lived a very holy life.

Three books in a tower

One of the sisters found a way to get books in to him. There were three: the Bible, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and the Sentences of Peter Lombard. Aristotle was a great thinker of the ancient world, and the Sentences was the textbook that students of theology used. St. Thomas didn’t just read them. He learned them by heart.

Outside the tower, the Dominicans hadn’t forgotten him. They got Pope Innocent IV and the Emperor Frederick II to order him set free. His brothers were too proud to obey. But they were afraid of the Pope and the Emperor. So they agreed to look the other way while St. Thomas escaped. He was let down from a tower window in a basket. Friars were waiting below to catch him. They took him back to Naples.

Peter Calo wrote one of the early lives of St. Thomas. He says the friars were delighted with what they found. Shut away with three books, St. Thomas “had made as much progress as if he had been in a studium generale” (a great house of study).

About seven years later, in 1251 or 1252 AD, the Dominicans sent St. Thomas to teach in Paris. His main job there was explaining the Sentences of Peter Lombard. It was the same book his sister had got to him in the tower.