MARCH 2024 EDITION: Thomism and the Torch of Tradition

March 2024 Edition Now Available — Preview HERE

March 7, 2024
Commemoration of St. Thomas Aquinas

Dear Friends of Catholic Tradition,

The Irishman in me would want to write to you of St. Patrick, whose feast occurs this month. Yet, he is not the only great beacon offered for our contemplation this month. On March 7, the day of his death, the Church commemorates the Angelic Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas. Pope Leo XIII in his Encyclical on Thomism, Aeterni Patris, wrote that among “the Scholastic Doctors, the chief and master of all towers Thomas Aquinas…. With his spirit at once humble and swift, his memory ready and tenacious, his life spotless throughout, a lover of truth for its own sake, richly endowed with human and divine science, like the sun he heated the world with the warmth of his virtues and filled it with the splendor of his teaching.” As explained by Leo XIII, in a certain sense Aquinas had no “teaching” of his own. St. Thomas “collected together and cemented, distributed in wonderful order, and so increased with important additions” the teaching of the ancient Fathers. He reconciled the perennial philosophy of Aristotle with the knowledge provided by Christian revelation that was not available to the one whom St. Thomas called “The Philosopher.”

We live in a world that has virtually erased not only the teaching of Aristotle but the wisdom of the Church Fathers from our memory. The Modernists knew that to remake the Church in their image they needed to erase the clarity and precision of the great synthesis wrought by St. Thomas. In the light of the sun that St. Thomas shone on the world, their errors and deceptions would be put in full view. They thus worked for decades to reduce and eventually eliminate the teaching of St. Thomas from seminaries. We will only be able to preserve traditional doctrine and liturgy if we preserve the sound teaching of St. Thomas and not the distortion and misuse that has been made in his name by the post-Conciliar Popes. John Paul II laid claim to having reconciled St. Thomas with modern errors in the form of the philosophy of Phenomenology. Pope Francis invokes St. Thomas’ name to imply the great doctor would support his outlandish remaking of natural law. We must preserve the authentic teaching of St. Thomas which for centuries was the touchstone of orthodoxy for all philosophical and theological studies.

Yet, St. Thomas was not a stereotype of the abstract modern intellectual. He lived a vibrant faith. After receiving a mysterious private revelation from Our Lord in the Host (during which Our Lord told Thomas he had written well of Him), Thomas put down his pen and wrote nothing more declaring all he had written thus far was straw in the light of the glimpse of the divinity that he was granted. Such a reaction is not that of a prideful intellectual but a humble Christian.

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All of us here wish you a happy feast of St. Thomas Aquinas and a holy end to our Lenten observances.

In Christ the King,

Brian M. McCall
Editor-in-Chief