65 St. Thomas Aquinas

St. Thomas Aquinas

His Life and Context
We continue our meditation on some of the great thinkers of the Middle Ages. We recently looked at the great figure of St. Bonaventure, a Franciscan, and here I discuss the one whom the Church calls the Doctor Communis, namely, St. Thomas Aquinas. In his encyclical Fides et Ratio, my venerable predecessor Pope John Paul II recalled that “the Church has been justified in consistently proposing St. Thomas as a master of thought and a model of the right way to do theology” (n. 43). It is not surprising that, after St. Augustine, among the
ecclesiastical writers mentioned in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, St. Thomas is cited more than any other, at least sixty-one times! He was also called the Doctor Angelicus, perhaps because of his virtues and, in particular, the sublimity of his thought and the purity of
his life…

Taken from Great Christian Thinkers by Pope Benedict XVI