St. Thomas Aquinas

Who they were

Thomas was a nobleman's son intended for a comfortable abbacy, who instead joined the Dominicans, mendicant beggars, at nineteen. His family's response was to kidnap him on the road and lock him in the family castle for roughly a year to break his resolve; it failed, famously including the episode with the hired woman and the firebrand. Freed, he studied under Albert the Great, whose classmates called the silent big man "the dumb ox," and Albert's reply became the standing rebuke to every underestimation: this ox's bellowing will fill the world. The *Summa Theologiae*, the most consulted work of theology ever written, he left deliberately unfinished; after an experience at Mass in his last year he stopped writing entirely, saying everything he had written seemed like straw compared to what he had seen. He died at forty-nine, en route to a Church council.

Why people turn to St. Thomas Aquinas

Patron of students by centuries of usage, and of everyone facing an exam, a thesis, or a subject that will not yield. His own student prayer, asking for clarity in understanding, order in study, and completeness in expression, survives and belongs on this page.

How to ask their intercession

Before study, not only before the exam. Ask for order and patience with the material, his gifts, rather than for the exam to be easy, which he would consider a strange request. ---