St. Thomas Aquinas, priest and Doctor of the Church

The Feast or Memorial of Thomas Aquinas, the “Angelic Doctor” of the Church had been set on March 7 for centuries.  With the renewal of the Liturgical Year following Vatican II, however, Thomas’ memorial for the Universal Church was moved to January 28 to keep it out of the Lenten Season. The Dominican Order continues to celebrate his memory on March 7. 

The Memorial of St. Thomas, allows special readings from the lectionary of the saints or the readings of the daily lectionary of ordinary time of the Church year.  The latter readings from Second Samuel and the Gospel of Mark fit remarkably well with any meditation on Thomas’ life.

The reading from Second Samuel focuses on the sacrifices of Thanksgiving which David offered to honor the Will of God made present in the manna (bread) that fed the Israelites in the desert. The sacrifices David offered as King were consumed by the people to make them capable of doing God’s will in their own time.

Christians understand a “sacrifice” to be a donation of one’s life (symbolically given) on behalf of praising God and accomplishing the work of God’s Kingdom.  Thomas’s gift of his intellectual life for the sake of the work of the Church of the 13th Century was remarkably effective because so humbly and completely given.

Thomas offered his whole life, his work, his insights – everything as a sacrifice of Thanksgiving, and his offering was accepted and transformed by God into a means of enabling humans to realize that God created our human gifts, especially reason, to be used in God’s service.  While his life and scholarship were time-bound, the methods he used and way he integrated multiple strands of thought into brilliant intercultural insight seems contemporary. 

When I reflect on Thomas’ scholarship, what stuns me about him is that his brilliant scholarship was accomplished on different topics at the same time to honor requests of Popes and Kings as well as his own superiors in the Dominican Order or dictated by the needs of the times.   On his regular work day, he would dictate his insights and conclusions a paragraph or two each, for 3 or 4 books at a time on different topics, while he paced back and forth. He never seemed to lose his thought or his place in any of these different projects while he attended to another project.  His ability to read and translate several languages, and to serve as a spiritual director and school administrator while he was doing this scholarly work is simply astounding.  In our culture today, so fond of multi-tasking, I have not heard of anyone capable of these feats of intellectual focus and prowess.

While Thomas is often honored for his work with the writings of other brilliant philosophical and theological scholars, true to his Dominican heritage, Thomas was completely enamored of the Scriptural word.  Today’s Gospel from Mark places him squarely in the family of Jesus who announces that his mother and brothers and sisters are to be understood to be all those who hear the Will of God and do it with their whole hearts.  In the Gospel of John, Jesus says that the Father’s Will is his Bread to eat, so those who live out God’s Will become Bread for the world in multiple ways.  Thomas’s memorial neatly ties the readings together because Thomas’ offering of his gifts serves as bread or food for the intellect and the heart as David’s did in his sacrifice before the ark.   The Angelic Doctor’s writings feed our understanding and our desire to hear and follow Jesus as Thomas himself did.