Thursday, January 28, 2010

Happy Feast Day!!! St. Thomas Aquinas!

I knew I would be blogging today,..not because of some angst ridden issue with the Church, politics, the crisis in Haiti, or any other rant that people have become accustomed to through my writings. Today is the feast of St Thomas Aquinas! Sadly most Catholics know Thomas as the name of a school or just another saint in the calender,..well...Our brother 'the Dumb Ox' stand up and take a bow!

Being that I consider myself a relatively young Catholic and belonging to a movement which calls for an authentic reform,..Thomas Aquinas indirectly became my mentor especially during my initial conversion when I thought 'truth' didn't exist. It took me a year to read his Summa Theologica synthesizing Aristotelian thought with the Christian mind, and all the while I felt like someone had turned on a faucette of knowledge. Oh yeah Thomas wasn't known for his looks, as well, there was the incident where he chased a woman with a piece of iron used to stroke firewood,..but all in all, we owe our modern universities in part to his movement, scholasticism. Towards the end of his life Thomas underwent a mystical experience of God, declaring all that he wrote was straw. A truly amazing grace filled experience. His Summa, of course remained unfinished. Today Thomas stands as a doctor of the Church, and his writings are returning to their proper place within the seminaries especially in the training of new priests.

Saint Thomas Aquinas,....Ora Pro Nobis!

No comments: