Memorial of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Priest and Doctor of the Church (January 28th, 2016)

Today the Church commemorates one of the heroes of our Faith- St. Thomas Aquinas.

St. Thomas Aquinas was born in the year 1225 into a wealthy and influential family.

Much to his parent’s chagrin, he expressed that it was his intention to enter what at the time seemed to many to be a radical, if not revolutionary religious movement- the Dominicans, a community dedicated to serve the Church through preaching and teaching.

Members of the Dominican Order would surrender everything for the cause of advancing the Church’s mission, embracing a life of self-sacrifice that expressed itself in vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.

Thomas’ family, had hoped that the piety of their son could be leveraged to further advance the fortunes of the family. After all, through their network of connections they could position him to be a great man- an abbot of a prosperous monastery or even a bishop. Thomas had no interest in any of this.

And so young Thomas, at the age of 19, abandoned all prospects of wealth, pleasure, power and honors and entered the Dominican Order.

It was apparent to his teachers that Thomas was a prodigy, and he would become one of the great intellectuals of his age. So great were his gifts that he is acknowledged as one of the most important intellectual figures to have ever lived. But for us Christians, he is more than this- Thomas is a Saint of the Church and his wisdom endures as a resource that engages our own spiritual aspirations and his legacy of preaching and teaching continues to direct and influence the life of the Church.

Not only a teacher and preacher, but also a poet and mystic, he is truly one of the greatest masters of the Christian life.

St. Thomas died in the year 1274.

What lesson does the witness of St. Thomas Aquinas offer to us?

We live in an age of the Church’s life in which there has been a tragic devaluation of the importance of the life of the mind in relation to the Christian way of life. Thinking about the faith is seen as a distraction from practical and emotional matters. Creative and inspired scholarship is needed and sorely lacking.

Some, embracing philosophical and ideological trends construe scholarship in the Church as project of debunking the Church’s beliefs or as a means used to make sure that the practices of the Christian life serve secular conceits. The legacy of Christian witness if presented at all, is presented so as to be dismissed.

Others, see scholarship in the Church as merely akin to the conservation of a museum piece, not appreciating the Church’s intellectual inheritance as something living and vital.   The Faith becomes an archaism, rather than a way of life.

And there are those who see little need for the Church to think at all, preferring the solace of emotions and sentiment alone without recourse to reason or so fearful of the unpredictability of life, preferring the retreat from reason into credulity that becomes the terrors of fundamentalism.

St. Thomas Aquinas invites us to abandon a faith that is content with little, if any, understanding or thinks the life of the mind inhibits sanctity, rather than enhancing it.

The Church needs a new generation of scholars who like St. Thomas Aquinas, will take seriously the life of the mind and that mature faith always seeks to understand what the Church believes and practices and why.

 

Memorial of Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus, Virgin and Doctor of the Church (October 1st, 2015)

Today the Church celebrates the witness of a cloistered, Carmelite nun who became one of the most powerful and influential women in the history of the Church- St. Therese of Lisieux.

Born in the year 1873, Therese Martin would enter the Carmelite community at the age of 15 in the year 1888. For those who are unfamiliar with the Carmelite way of life, it is a life of austerity and utter simplicity through which by living in the most radical way, vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, one cultivates detachment from worldly desires so as to serve Christ alone. (While many Christians choose to live as “weekend warriors” in terms of being a disciple of the Lord Jesus, a faithful Carmelite is an Olympic athlete).

Therese’s entry into this radical form of religious life essentially meant that she would disappear entirely (and literally) into the mission of the Church.

After 18 months of physical decline caused by tuberculosis, a decline that was accompanied by a crucible of spiritual desolation, Therese died into the year 1897. She was 24 years old.

Death should have extinguished any memory of Therese Martin, but within a few years she was renowned throughout the world. By 1925, she would be canonized a saint. In the year 1997 she was declared by Pope St. John Paul II to be a Doctor of the Church, which means that her perspective on the nature of the Christian life is considered to be authoritative and esteemed, a privileged reference point for disciples seeking to advance and grow in faith, hope and love.

The cause of St. Therese renown was the publication of her journal in the year 1898. Therese began this journal at the advice of her superiors in religious life in the year 1895 and it witnesses to her relationship with Christ, a relationship that began and intensified at a very early age and matured in the Carmelite community of Lisieux.

Within the personal narrative of the journal is a proposal in regards to the Christian way of life- one which Therese insists is about “simplicity without pretense”, a way she describes as “confidence and love”, in which one’s fidelity to Christ is manifested in accepting and fulfilling the demand of love in the immediacy of life’s circumstances. Therese summarized this disposition as “doing the least things with great love”.

It is in this low key, mostly unnoticed and unappreciated death to self that sanctity most often happens. Heroism in terms of the Christian life is to be appreciated and emulated, but unless the aspiration towards the great ideals of the Gospel is accompanied by love, our efforts cannot accomplish their divinely ordained purpose- to make us saints.

Thus, the real crucible in which holiness happens will take place in the immediacy of our lives, in loving those who present themselves to us without hesitation or complaint; in giving to those who offer us little or nothing in return.

St. Therese’s “little way” has deep resonance for disciples of the Lord Jesus and the accessibility of her witness as presented in “The Story of A Soul” made her a spiritual friend to thousands and thousands. Stories of her intercession in matters great and small are plentiful. No saint, other than perhaps St. Francis of Assisi, is as well known. Devotees of her spiritual way include such diverse figures as Dorothy Day and Edith Piaf, Jack Kerouac and Thomas Merton, Henri Bergson and Jean Vanier, Bishop Barron and Pope Francis.

The providence of God assigned St. Therese of Liseux to obscurity in her earthly life and the same providence made her one of the Church’s most renowned heavenly friends and intercessors.

Pope Benedict XVI said of St. Therese- “trust and love illumined the whole of her journey to holiness and enabled her to guide others to Christ along the same way”.  May St. Therese intercede for us, teach us trust and love, so that we might find her and follow her along the little way.