Doctor Angelicus
Our Dominican brother, St Thomas Aquinas - whose feast is today (28 January) - is shown holding the Eucharist as he not only composed the liturgy for the feast of Corpus Christi, but wrote exceedingly well about the Church's faith in the Eucharist and the abiding Presence of Christ in the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Altar.
On account of this, and his teaching concerning the angels, he is called the Angelic Doctor, as well as the Common Doctor of the Church. As Pope Leo XIII said:
"Among the Scholastic Doctors, the chief and master of all towers Thomas Aquinas, who, as Cajetan observes, because "he most venerated the ancient doctors of the Church, in a certain way seems to have inherited the intellect of all." The doctrines of those illustrious men, like the scattered members of a body, Thomas collected together and cemented, distributed in wonderful order, and so increased with important additions that he is rightly and deservedly esteemed the special bulwark and glory of the Catholic faith. 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 splendour of his teaching".
This is a detail from the reredos in the former Dominican priory church of Hawkesyard in Staffordshire. The church was dedicated to St Thomas Aquinas.
Doctor Angelicus
Our Dominican brother, St Thomas Aquinas - whose feast is today (28 January) - is shown holding the Eucharist as he not only composed the liturgy for the feast of Corpus Christi, but wrote exceedingly well about the Church's faith in the Eucharist and the abiding Presence of Christ in the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Altar.
On account of this, and his teaching concerning the angels, he is called the Angelic Doctor, as well as the Common Doctor of the Church. As Pope Leo XIII said:
"Among the Scholastic Doctors, the chief and master of all towers Thomas Aquinas, who, as Cajetan observes, because "he most venerated the ancient doctors of the Church, in a certain way seems to have inherited the intellect of all." The doctrines of those illustrious men, like the scattered members of a body, Thomas collected together and cemented, distributed in wonderful order, and so increased with important additions that he is rightly and deservedly esteemed the special bulwark and glory of the Catholic faith. 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 splendour of his teaching".
This is a detail from the reredos in the former Dominican priory church of Hawkesyard in Staffordshire. The church was dedicated to St Thomas Aquinas.