Saint Thomas Aquinas

Saint Thomas Aquinas was born at Roccasecca. His father was Landulph, count of Aquino. His mother, Theodora, countess of Teano in her own right, came of the Norman princes.

At about five he was handed to the Benedictine monks of Monte Cassino, where the abbot was his own uncle. He spoke very little there, as he did all his life, but he asked his master over and over what God is.

In the autumn of 1236 AD St. Thomas entered the University of Naples. A law of the Emperor Frederick II forbade his subjects to study anywhere else, so Count Landulph had no other choice to make.

At the Dominican convent the prior and the preacher Father John of St Julian told him to wait three years before taking the habit. He was clothed as a Friar Preacher at Naples in August 1243 AD. His father had intended him instead for the abbacy of Monte Cassino.

His entry into the Order displeased his mother and his brothers, and the master general sent him out of Italy toward Paris with a few other friars. His mother sent a mounted courier to her elder sons, who commanded the emperor's forces in Tuscany. They overtook the friars on the road north of Rome and carried St. Thomas off by force. His brothers half-tore the friar's frock from his back on the road, and the attempt to strip it off was dropped.

They shut him in the keep of the castle of Monte San Giovanni for eighteen months or two years, and his parents, brothers and sisters worked by various means to break his vocation. When his brothers sent a woman into the room, he snatched a burning brand from the fire and drove her out. According to longstanding Catholic Tradition, recorded in the depositions for his canonisation, two angels then girded him with a cord of chastity as he slept.

He left the castle at last, let down from a window in a basket into the arms of the Dominicans. He made solemn profession at Naples in January 1245 AD. Pope Innocent IV examined his motives, dismissed him with a blessing, and forbade any further interference with his vocation.

The master general took him out of Italy, beyond his family's reach, to St. Albert the Great at Cologne. The students there called him the dumb ox, and his master told them his bellowing would one day be heard through the whole world. Conrad of Hochstaden, archbishop of Cologne, ordained him priest in 1250 AD.

The Order sent St. Thomas back to Paris in 1252 AD to lecture as bachelor in its own house of studies. The university's secular masters were fighting to shut the mendicant friars out of the chairs of theology. A university proctor walked into his Palm Sunday sermon and read out a letter against the friars.

He said nothing until the man had finished, then took up the sermon again. St. Thomas was one of those who read their answers to William of Saint-Amour's book against the friars before Pope Alexander IV at Anagni. The Pope condemned the book on October 5, 1256 AD, and ordered that the friars be admitted to the doctorate. St. Thomas was received with cap and ring as a Doctor of Paris on October 23, 1257 AD.

In August 1272 AD St. Thomas left Rome for Naples to teach, because Charles, King of Sicily, asked for him. There he carried the Summa theologiae into its Third Part, on Christ and the sacraments. Through the whole of Lent in 1273 AD he preached every day in the cathedral on the angel's greeting to Our Lady.

According to longstanding Catholic Tradition, three of the friars saw him lifted in ecstasy that year and heard a voice from the crucifix on the altar say that he had written well of Him and ask what reward he would have, and he answered that he would have the Lord himself. On December 6, 1273 AD, after a long ecstasy at Mass, he laid aside his pen and wrote no more. The Summa was left broken off in the treatise on Penance.

Blessed Pope Gregory X summoned him to a general council opening at Lyons on May 1, 1274 AD. St. Thomas left Naples on foot on January 28, 1274 AD. The Pope had ordered him to bring his treatise against the errors of the Greeks. His strength failed him near Terracina, and he was taken to the castle of his niece at Maenza.

The Cistercian monks of Fossanova pressed their hospitality on him, and he was carried to their abbey and put to bed. He received the last sacraments there and died in the early morning of March 7, 1274 AD. According to longstanding Catholic Tradition, his old master St. Albert the Great wept at table in Cologne that day and told the friars at table that St. Thomas, his son in Christ, had died.

Early in 1304 AD the Cistercians of Fossanova cut off his head and hid the body rather than give up the grave. Pope John XXII enrolled him among the saints at Avignon on July 18, 1323 AD. The relics were borne into the Dominican church at Toulouse on January 28, 1369 AD, the day the Church now keeps his memorial.

Pope St. Pius V proclaimed him a Doctor of the Universal Church in 1567 AD. Pope Leo XIII called in 1879 AD for Catholic schools to restore their philosophy after the mind of St. Thomas. A year later to the day, on August 4, 1880 AD, the same Pope named him patron of every Catholic university, college and school in the world.