St. Thomas Aquinas: between ecumenism and schools

January 28 is the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). It fell this year between the week of prayer for Christian unity, which always ends on the feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, January 25, and Catholic Schools Week, which is celebrated this year from January 29 to February 2. Both ecumenism and Catholic schools take up the search for truth and the handing on of received truth. Thomas Aquinas spent his life doing both.

Thomas wanted to be a priest in a new and somewhat scruffy order at the time: the Order of Preachers. His family opposed his choice, as families sometimes do today. If he had wanted to be a Benedictine monk, perhaps his well-placed family would have understood and approved. Benedictine monks lived well-ordered lives in monasteries that were an accepted and necessary part of medieval society and economy; the newly founded Dominican friars were itinerant preachers and lived from alms rather than from monastery fields. The Aquino family captured and imprisoned Thomas to keep him from becoming a Dominican; but he found his way to the Order that was, for him, a school of sanctity, was ordained a priest and became a professor of theology in the Dominicans’ own theologates and at the University of Paris.

		“Unlike government schools, Catholic schools can speak about God, can explore truths that are important not only for this life but for the next, can open up any question and explore any avenue.’

Theology is born from reflection on Holy Scripture from within the community of faith that tells us Scripture is God’s word and that lives from the grace given in the events through which God saves his people. St. Thomas’ works are therefore filled first of all with quotations from Scripture, then with quotes, arguments and comments from the earliest learned witnesses to the faith, the Fathers of the Church, especially St. Augustine. What was new in Thomas’ reflections was his reliance on the pagan Greek philosopher Aristotle, who was being rediscovered in Thomas’ day through translations into Latin from the original Greek and from Arabic commentators on Aristotle.

Thomas sought truth wherever it could be found, and Aristotle for him was simply “the master of those who know.” Everything was grist for Aquinas’ intellectual mill, even the writings of a philosopher who argued to the existence of a god unable to know anyone else, a god completely different from the God to whom Aquinas prayed. At times, Thomas ate at the table of the King of France and worked at the behest of the Pope; he taught ordinary people in Naples and university students in Paris. Always, however, there was an inner conversation with the best minds of his own and prior ages. Deeper still, there was a constant conversation in his heart with the Lord to whom he had vowed his life.

A few months before Aquinas died, he suffered a kind of mental and physical crisis and declared that all he had written was like straw in comparison with what the Lord had helped him to see in prayer. He ceased writing and lecturing. He was 49 when he died. Aristotle’s predecessor, the Greek philosopher Plato, had written that no one could be considered wise before fifty. In this opinion, as in various others, even Plato was wrong. There is a wisdom far greater than anything the unaided human mind can discover in its own experience, the wisdom offered us in God’s self-revelation.

The search for wisdom sent St. Thomas Aquinas to the Bible as a sacred text and to poverty as a way of life. The search for unity among all those who, like St. Thomas Aquinas, call Jesus “Lord” sends us to the same sources: to Scripture, the written witness to divine revelation in human history, the text all Christians hold in common; and to poverty, for only in poverty of spirit can we turn to the Lord for direction and help. The ecumenical prayer in Chicago at St. James Episcopal Cathedral on January 18 to celebrate the week of prayer for Christian unity cried out again and again: Lord, have mercy. Have mercy on us because, for each advance in mutual understanding and shared truth, there is another division not only in visible Church unity but in Church teaching, especially about moral issues of the day. Have mercy on us because, for each deepening of the desire to be one, there is another memory which refuses to be healed. Have mercy on us because, for every moment we are truly submissive to the Lord’s will, there are countless others when we continue obstinately in our own ways. We are poor; unity must be a gift to us from a merciful Lord. Living before the Protestant Reformation but after the beginning of the schism between the Orthodox Churches and the Catholic Church, Thomas clarified the foundations of the Christian faith in his great but unfinished summary of theology, the Summa Theologiae. Less known today is his earlier Summa contra Gentiles, a work of theology for the use of Christians engaged in dialogue with Muslims. Aquinas knew how to look at things from within the mind of those who disagreed with him, finding places from which to begin a conversation with the hope of finding some agreement in faith and communion in life. St. Thomas wrote, “Truth is strong in itself, and no assault weakens it.” His realism and open-mindedness made him not only the “Common Doctor of the Church” but in a certain sense a universal teacher, for he was disposed to receive what was best in all cultures. He was confident that truth cannot be wrenched out of the human heart.

For obvious reasons, St. Thomas Aquinas is the patron of Catholic schools. The Catholic schools of the Archdiocese are now engaged in a process to strengthen them for the future. Some elements of this process, especially of the search for new ways of putting them on a firm financial basis, get reported and others do not. A plan which works well in Cleveland, in Washington D.C. and other dioceses to charge the full cost of tuition but then work with families to increase aid to students as needed got translated in the telling as a large increase in tuition. If this partially reported story undermines confidence in the future of the Catholic schools, it will be a tragedy not only for the children in them now but for this community. For religious schools are the only schools totally free to explore truth in all its dimensions. Unlike government schools, Catholic schools can speak about God, can explore truths that are important not only for this life but for the next, can open up any question and explore any avenue. The faith provides a context in which all the major questions that are at the heart of human existence can be explored. The most important truth children can ever learn is that God loves them. Public schools are not allowed to teach this, and our society suffers because of it.

During Catholic Schools Week, 2001, we joined our prayer to our congratulations to all those who create Catholic primary and secondary schools here: the students themselves; their parents and guardians; those who provide scholarship money, especially the Big Shoulders Foundation; the staff and administrators in the schools and in the Archdiocesan school office and the various religious orders who sponsor schools; the pastors and parishes who subsidize the schools. May the Lord bless them all and inspire us to support them. God bless you.

Sincerely yours in Christ,

Francis Cardinal George, OMI
Archbishop of Chicago