Sunday 4 October27th Sunday in Ordinary TimeLiturgical colour: green
Stone & Incense
JourneysCurious, or no faithEvangelical, Pentecostal or ProtestantOrthodox, or other apostolic ChristianFallen-away CatholicBecoming CatholicGrowing CatholicAnother faith LibraryThe CaseVoices of the revivalFind a parishAboutSources & methodSupport the site
The saints

St Thomas Aquinas

His family locked him in a castle to stop him becoming a friar. He became the greatest theologian of the Middle Ages.

Feast: 28 January · about 1225 to 1274 · Roccasecca, Italy, and Paris, France

Read the story 1 min read
The palm-tree vault of the Jacobins church in Toulouse: ribs spread like fronds from a single slender column.

Frédéric Neupont, 2014. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Home / The saints / St Thomas Aquinas

Roccasecca, southern Italy, about 1244

A young nobleman has joined the friars of St Dominic, and his family is furious.1

His brothers, soldiers of the Emperor, seize him on the road near Aquapendente and lock him in the family fortress at Roccasecca.1

They held him for nearly two years. His sister smuggled him books: the Scriptures, Aristotle, Peter Lombard. The time was not lost.

Patron of Catholic universities and schools1

01St Thomas Aquinas

What is God?

As a boy at the abbey of Monte Cassino, Thomas kept asking his teacher one question: what is God?1

He studied at Naples, then under St Albert the Great, and taught in Paris and across Italy.1

His Summa Theologiae became one of the great works of Christian thought.1

02St Thomas Aquinas

The patron of schools

Thomas died at Fossanova on 7 March 1274.1

In 1880 Pope Leo XIII named him patron of all Catholic universities, academies, colleges and schools.1

The palm-tree vault of the Jacobins church in Toulouse: ribs spread like fronds from a single slender column.
The Jacobins church in Toulouse, where the relics of St Thomas Aquinas rest. Frédéric Neupont, 2014. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Notes

  1. Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), “St. Thomas Aquinas”. New Advent edition. newadvent.org

The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) is in the public domain; we quote the New Advent edition. Texts of the Holy See are quoted briefly from vatican.va. Scripture: Douay-Rheims, Challoner revision (public domain). Photographs: Wikimedia Commons, credited under each image; full list on the photo credits page.

Lines in the narrator’s voice, without a note, are our reflection, not a historical claim. Stone & Incense restates Church teaching in plain words; our wording is not an official Church text. Report an error.