Saint Thomas Aquinas

Thomas was born in 1224 or 1225 in his family’s castle of Roccasecca, near Aquino, between Rome and Naples. His parents sent him as a boy to the abbey of Monte Cassino for his first schooling, and he went on to the university that Emperor Frederick II had founded at Naples, where Aristotle was taught without the limits set elsewhere. There he was drawn to the Order of Preachers. His family opposed his choice and held him at home for a time, and he kept to his vocation.

In 1245 the order sent him to Paris to study under Saint Albert the Great, whom he followed to Cologne. Back in Paris, he lectured from 1252 and was regent master in theology from 1256 to 1259. He then taught in Italy, at Orvieto from 1261 to 1265 and at Rome from 1265 to 1268, returned to Paris for a second regency from 1268 to 1272, and left to found a house of studies at Naples.

His writings include commentaries on Scripture and on Aristotle and the Summa Theologiae, which he left unfinished. In December 1273, after an experience during Mass, he told his friend and secretary Reginald that he would write no more, for all he had written now seemed worthless to him. Called by Pope Gregory X to the Council of Lyon, he died on the way, at the Cistercian abbey of Fossanova, on March 7, 1274.

Further reading: Avignon: A Pilgrim’s Guide to the City of the Popes; Mary Magdalene in Provence: The Tradition and the Shrines.

Pope John XXII canonized Thomas at Avignon on July 18, 1323, and Pope Saint Pius V declared him a Doctor of the Church on April 15, 1567. He is called the Angelic Doctor and the Common Doctor, and in 1880 Pope Leo XIII named him patron of Catholic schools and universities. In 1368 Pope Urban V ordered his body given to the Dominicans of Toulouse, the city where Saint Dominic had gathered his first brothers, and it was laid in the church of the Jacobins on January 28, 1369. Since the reformed calendar of 1969 his feast has been kept on that date, in place of March 7, the day of his death.

During the Revolution the relics were taken to the basilica of Saint-Sernin, and they returned to the Jacobins in 1974, when the restoration of the church, owned by the city of Toulouse since 1804, was complete. For the anniversaries of 2023 to 2025, seven hundred years from his canonization, seven hundred and fifty from his death and eight hundred from his birth, the skull venerated as his was placed on January 26, 2023, in a new reliquary designed by Augustin Frison-Roche and entrusted for three years to the Dominicans of Toulouse, who were to take it to other houses of the order before its return to the Jacobins.

Thomas is shown in the Dominican habit, often with a ray of light on his breast, a dove for the Holy Spirit, a lily, a chalice or a book. The Louvre has Benozzo Gozzoli’s Triumph of Saint Thomas Aquinas, painted about 1470, which shows him in glory between Plato and Aristotle. In the church of the Jacobins at Toulouse, where his relics rest, the vault of the choir springs from a single column about ninety feet high, with twenty-two ribs, known as the palm tree.

Patron of Catholic schools and universities, named by Pope Leo XIII in 1880.

• ToulouseThe church of the Jacobins, where his relics have rested since 1369, apart from the years at Saint-Sernin between the Revolution and 1974.
• ParisThe parish church of Saint-Thomas-d’Aquin, former chapel of the general novitiate of the Dominicans, begun in 1682.

On our ways: Toulouse.

• Via DominiciThe Way of Saint Dominic, seven daysDay II, Toulouse