Saint Thomas Aquinas, Priest and Doctor of the Church

Thomas was born about 1225 into a noble family at Roccasecca near Aquino and schooled at Monte Cassino. When he joined the new Order of Preachers, his brothers seized him and kept him confined at home for about a year. He studied under Albert the Great, and his classmates called the large, silent student “the dumb ox.”

He taught in Paris, Naples and Rome and wrote an enormous body of work, above all the Summa Theologiae, which joined the philosophy of Aristotle to Christian teaching. In December 1273 he stopped writing, saying that all he had written seemed to him like straw. He died on 7 March 1274 at the Cistercian abbey of Fossanova, on his way to the Council of Lyon. He was canonized in 1323 and named a Doctor of the Church in 1567.