Foundations

St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) is one of the greatest thinkers in the history of the world and the Church's foremost theologian. Born to a noble Italian family near Naples, Thomas shocked his relatives by refusing a comfortable career as an abbot to join the new Dominican friars — a poor order of preachers. His family was so opposed that they kidnapped and imprisoned him for over a year, but he held firm. A large, quiet man, his fellow students nicknamed him 'the Dumb Ox,' but his teacher St. Albert the Great prophesied, 'This ox will one day fill the world with his bellowing.' He was right. Thomas devoted his life to the great project of his age: showing that faith and reason are not enemies but friends, both gifts of the one God of truth. Where some feared the newly rediscovered philosophy of Aristotle as a threat to Christianity, Thomas embraced reason and used Aristotle's tools to explain and defend the faith more clearly than ever before. His masterwork, the 'Summa Theologiae,' is a vast, orderly synthesis of Christian theology — though he left it unfinished, saying near the end of his life that after a mystical experience of God, all he had written 'seems like straw' compared to what he had glimpsed. Canonized in 1323 and named a Doctor of the Church, 'the Angelic Doctor' also wrote beautiful Eucharistic hymns still sung today. He embodies this week's virtue: the love of truth.

The high Middle Ages produced an institution we still use today: the university. Growing out of cathedral and monastery schools, the first universities took shape around 1100–1200 — Bologna (famous for law), Paris (for theology), Oxford, and others. The word 'university' comes from universitas, a 'guild' or corporation of scholars and students. Here a new method of learning called Scholasticism developed: rigorous, logical inquiry that posed a question, gathered objections, weighed authorities, and reasoned to a conclusion. Scholastics prized debate, precise definitions, and the conviction that truth is coherent — that what is true in reason cannot contradict what is true in faith, because God is the author of both. A great catalyst arrived from the Islamic world and Byzantium: the full works of Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, newly translated into Latin. Aristotle's powerful tools of logic and his investigation of the natural world were thrilling — and alarming. Some churchmen feared this 'pagan' philosophy would corrupt the faith. The genius of St. Thomas Aquinas was to show the opposite: that reason, rightly used, leads toward God, and that Aristotle's philosophy could be 'baptized' to serve Christian truth. Faith perfects reason; reason serves faith; neither need fear the other. This confident marriage of faith and reason is the crowning achievement of the medieval mind — and a direct answer to the modern myth that the Middle Ages were 'anti-intellectual.' On the contrary, the medieval Church founded the universities and believed, with Aquinas, that to seek the truth is to seek God.

We complete our tour of the seven sacraments with the two 'sacraments at the service of communion': Holy Orders and Matrimony. YOUCAT 249 teaches that in Holy Orders a man is ordained — as deacon, priest, or bishop — to serve the Church in the person of Christ, especially by preaching, governing, and (for priests and bishops) celebrating the sacraments, above all the Eucharist. Through ordination, the apostolic mission Christ gave the Twelve continues down to our own day; the bishop is a successor of the apostles. Like Baptism and Confirmation, Holy Orders imprints a permanent character. Matrimony, YOUCAT 260 teaches, is the covenant by which a man and a woman form a lifelong partnership ordered to their own good and to the procreation and education of children. Christ raised marriage to a sacrament: the love of husband and wife becomes a sign of Christ's faithful love for his Church (Ephesians 5). Its essential properties are unity (one man, one woman) and indissolubility (until death) — and the spouses themselves are the ministers of the sacrament, conferring it on each other through their consent. Both sacraments point outward: where the sacraments of healing restore the individual, Holy Orders and Matrimony build up the whole community — one through spiritual fatherhood, the other through the family, which the Church calls the 'domestic church.' Together with the five you have studied, they complete Christ's gift of grace touching every stage and state of human life.

Today you met the mind of the Middle Ages at its peak: universities, Aristotle, and Aquinas's confident teaching that faith and reason are friends. The medieval motto 'faith seeking understanding' (fides quaerens intellectum) captures it: we believe, and then we use our God-given reason to understand more deeply.