St. Thomas Aquinas

Their story

Thomas was born around 1225 at the family castle of Roccasecca, near Aquino in southern Italy. His noble family planned for him to become the abbot of the great Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino. Instead, he joined the Dominicans, a new order of poor, wandering preachers. His family was so upset that his brothers held him captive at home for about a year, but Thomas would not change his mind. He went on to study under St. Albert the Great. Thomas was big and quiet, so his classmates nicknamed him “the Dumb Ox.” Albert answered that one day the bellowing of this ox would be heard throughout the world. Thomas spent his life showing that faith and reason are friends, not enemies. Both come from God, who is Truth itself. In his Summa Theologiae he offered five ways human reason can come to know that God exists, by reflecting on motion, cause, order and purpose in the world. Near the end of his life, after a profound experience of God during Mass, he stopped writing, saying that everything he had written seemed like straw compared with what he had seen. Thomas died in 1274 on his way to a Church council. He is a Doctor of the Church, and his teaching still shapes how Catholics think about God today.