Preview: The 800th Anniversary of Saint Thomas Aquinas's Birth

On Monday, February 3, we'll continue our series on the Son Rise Morning Show marking special anniversaries this year. We just celebrated the feast day of Saint Thomas Aquinas  on January 28--on the 1962 calendar and some Dominican calendars it's on the day of his death on March 7--and Dominicans and the Church are in the midst of a three year jubilee celebration. It began with the 700th anniversary of his canonization (1323 to 2023), continued with the 750th anniversary of this death (1274-2024), and concludes with the 800th anniversary of Thomas Aquinas' birth (1225 to 2025), so it seems appropriate to comment upon that last jubilee celebration.

I'll be on the air at my usual time at the top of the second national hour of the Son Rise Morning Show on EWTN, about 7:50 a.m. Eastern/6:50 a.m. Central. Please listen live here or catch the podcast later here.

We know the date of his canonization, July 18, 1323, in Avignon by Pope John XXII; we know the date of his death, March 7, 1274 in the Cistercian Fossanova Abbey in Italy as he was en route to the Second Council of Lyon in France; we know the date of the original transfer of his remains from Fossanova to the Church of Jacobins in Toulouse, France, January 28, 1369. 

We don't know the date of his birth! According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, "The end of 1225 is usually assigned as the time of his birth." That's helpful?

G.K. Chesterton offers some background on Saint Thomas's birthright, if not his birth date:

Thomas Aquinas, in a strange and rather symbolic manner, sprang out of the very centre of the civilised world of his time; the central knot or coil of the powers then controlling Christendom. He was closely connected with all of them; even with some of them that might well be described as destroying Christendom. The whole religious quarrel, the whole international quarrel, was for him, a family quarrel. He was born in the purple, almost literally on the hem of the imperial purple; for his own cousin was the Holy Roman Emperor. He could have quartered half the kingdoms of Europe on his shield-- if he had not thrown away the shield. He was Italian and French and German and in every way European.

[I cannot help but recall the student blooper reported by Richard Lederer in Anguished English: "Handel was half German, half Italian, and half English. He was very large."] 

To this cosmopolitan comprehensiveness in his inherited position, he afterwards added many things of his own, that made for mutual understanding among the peoples, and gave him something of the character of an ambassador and interpreter. He travelled a great deal; he was not only well known in Paris and the German universities, but he almost certainly visited England; probably he went to Oxford and London; and it has been said that we may be treading in the footsteps of him and his Dominican companions, whenever we go down by the river to the railway-station that still bears the name of Black-friars. [?] But the truth applies to the travels of his mind as well as his body. He studied the literature even of the opponents of Christianity much more carefully and impartially than was then the fashion; he really tried to understand the Arabian Aristotelianism of the Moslems; and wrote a highly humane and reasonable treatise on the problem of the treatment of the Jews. He always attempted to look at everything from the inside; but he was certainly lucky in having been born in the inside of the state system and the high politics of his day.

Because he and his family were so integrated into the power structures of his day, Thomas's choice of vocation as a young man (about 19 years old) was disappointing to his family. While he felt called to Saint Dominic's Order of Preachers, his family wanted him to become the Abbot of Monte Cassino, succeeding his uncle. He'd begun his studies at that Benedictine abbey but then went to study at the university in Naples, where he encountered the Dominican order. 

His brothers captured him as he was on his way to Paris with some friars and he was held in the family castles at Monte San Giovanni and Roccasecca near Aquino for almost two years. His mother Theodora finally relented, and helped him escape and he was lowered in a basket to Dominican friars waiting below. He'd been studying all the time and was ready to continue doing so under the direction of Saint Albert the Great at Paris and Cologne. And of course there's the famous story of his brothers tempting him with a prostitute: he forced her away from him with a burning log and marked the wall with a cross with it, then angels visited him in a vision, promising the virtue of perfect chastity!

Except for the Blessed Virgin Mary and Saint John the Baptist we don't celebrate the births of saints as feasts on the Church calendar, but the renown of Saint Thomas Aquinas and his importance to Catholic theology and liturgy (the Feast of Corpus Christi), etc., means that this anniversary is important as it caps off the jubilees the Dominicans and the Church have been celebrating. 

In 2027, by the way, we could highlight the 460th anniversary of his being named a Universal Doctor of the Church in 1567 by Pope Saint Pius V and this year we could also remember that Pope Leo XIII named him the Patron of Catholic schools, universities, and colleges 145 years ago on August 4, 1880!

Saint Thomas Aquinas, pray for us!

Image credits (both Public Domain): top right: Detail of The Apotheosis of Saint Thomas Aquinas by Francisco de Zurbarán, 1631; bottom left: Thomas is girded by angels with a mystical belt of purity after his proof of chastity. Painting by Diego Velázquez.