St. Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor (c. 1225 – 1274), has been and continues to be one of the most influential forces shaping Catholic theology and philosophy. He was born at Roccasecca castle, the home of his father, Count Landulf, in the Kingdom of Naples. His mother was Theodora, Countess of Theate, and was related to the Hohenstafuen dyanasty of Holy Roman emperors. St. Thomas’s uncle, Sinbald, was the abbot of the first Benedictine monastery, Monte Cassino, and the family planned for him to succeed his uncle as abbot.

At the age of 5, St. Thomas was sent to Monte Cassino to begin his studies. At 16 he was sent to the University of Naples, where he came under the influence of the Order of Preachers – the Dominicans -who were innovators in a new style of religious life very different from that of traditional orders such as the Benedictines. St. Thomas upset his family by announcing his intention of joining the Dominicans. This action not only destroyed the family’s ambition to retain the power and prestige of Monte Cassino, but it was almost akin to running off with a band of hippies. Unable to convince him to renounce this foolishness, his family kidnapped him and held him for a year in the family castle of San Giovanni. Finally, Pope Innocent IV intervened and St. Thomas joined the Dominicans at 17.

St. Thomas and the Dominicans of his time introduced an entirely new way of approaching the faith. For 12 centuries, the Church teachers of the faith appealed to the authority of the scriptures and previous teachers such as St. Augustine or other Fathers of the Church. The scholastic movement, embodied by St. Thomas and his teacher St. Albert the Great, began with an open inquiry based on logic and reason. The traditional Faith was accepted as true, but thoughtful and logical reason were presented as to why it might not be true. Ultimately, various statements of belief were upheld, not only on the authority of the Church or tradition, but by reason and logic as well.

The format of the scholastic argument is the back bone of St. Thomas’s two major works, The Summa Theologica and the Summa Contra Gentiles. It is hard for us as post-modern people to imagine what a daring and threatening approach this was for the time. In fact the 1200s were a time of immense change in Europe. Trade and communications with the East had been reopened and with them came a flood of new and ancient knowledge. Trade and commerce increased the power and prestige of market towns at the expense of the countryside. Monastic schools gave way to early universities. The great Cathedrals began to dominate the landscape. The traditional clergy were overshadowed by the two great orders of mendicant friars (the begging brothers) – the Dominicans and the Franciscans.

St. Thomas, and his contemporary members of the scholastic movement, absorbed and transformed Islamic and Greek philosophy, science, technology, and mathematics. In particular, the Thomistic school of scholasticism is known for reviving the philosophy of Aristotle and its logic.

Over the centuries, scholastic philosophy would evolve and change in a variety of ways and St. Thomas – contrary to his own method – became the authority. Instead of being a fresh and bold inquiry, scholasticism degenerated into a catalog of arguments and answers to be memorized and repeated. In the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, scholasticism and Thomism were disregarded by secular philosophies reliant only on reason. Thomism was also marginalized in training programs for priests.

In the late 1800s, there was a movement to restore Thomism as a defense against the secular philosophies of the Enlightenment and to renew some intellectual vigor in Catholic circles. It was an attempt to come to grips with the modern world and met heavy resistance. In the early 1900s, Thomism began to assume some prominence and neo-Thomism emerged with a renewed interest in the relationship between faith and reason. It is a long and complicated story, but it reflects the enduring importance of the work of St. Thomas and the changing moods of society and philosophy.

The core question persists. What can we know of God through reason? The second question follows. How reasonable is our faith?

If we want to honor a man who was a mystic, a saint, and an intellectual, it seems that we have to take on the openness of his inquiry and the wonder he beheld in faith.

January 25 is the feast of the Conversion of St. Paul (Acts 22). Most of us are familiar with the story. Saul – his original name – was a Pharisee who was persecuting the very first Christians. (At that early stage believers called themselves Followers of the Way. The name Christian would come about later in Antioch)

St. Paul was on his way to Damascus with documents authorizing him to arrest and bring back Christians to Jerusalem for trial by the religious authorities. Scripture makes no reference to a horse, which is usually part of the depiction of the scene in which St. Paul is blinded by a bright light and falls to the ground. He hears a voice utter the now famous words “Saul, why are you persecuting me.” In the exchange, St. Paul asks who it is that is speaking to him – the response, ”I am Jesus, the Nazarene..”

According to scripture, we know that Paul was from Tarsus and that he was also a Roman citizen. His letters to the early congregations (churches) are the oldest documents in the New Testament. They reveal a man who is thoroughly Jewish in his mode of thinking and speech. Yet he is Christianity’s link to the larger Hellenistic world.

For those who like to emphasize the important role of St. Peter in the development of the Church, it can come as a shock that he and St. Paul disagreed so strongly about the incorporation of non-Jews, or gentiles. Some of us contemporary Catholics – with a certain sense of ironic humor – see this conflict as the first among many between a Pope and a theologian.

What is most significant about St. Paul’s conversion is his acceptance by the leadership of the early Christian community. Although they had substantial reasons to distrust his sincerity, they forgave an enemy – even one who had been an accomplice in the stoning of St. Stephen, the first martyr. They forgave a man who arrested and imprisoned their family members and friends. The book of the Acts of the Apostles shows that the leadership and the community had their misgivings, but they helped the repentant Saul to demonstrate his conversion, acting as mentors, teachers, and friends. Some helped more than others, and many not at all, yet it was enough.  And as they say… the rest is history.

December 14 is the feast day of St. John of the Cross (1542-1591), a mystic, reformer, and one of the greatest poets of Spanish literature’s Golden Age. He was born Juan de Yepes y Alvarez into a “converso” or converted Jewish family. His father died when he was young and he and his two older brothers, along with their mother, moved from village to village in Castilla, suffering from poverty and rejection by both Jews and Christians. At Medina del Campo, from 1559 to 1563, he studied humanities at the Jesuit school. In 1563, he entered the Carmelite Order and in 1564, he studied philosophy at the Colegio San Andres at the University of Salamanca. In 1567, he was ordained a priest and wanted to join the Carthusians, since he felt called to a life of silent contemplation. St. Theresa of Avila convinced him to help her reform the Carmelites instead.

In 1568, he co-founded the Discalced Carmelites ,with St. Teresa of Avila. (The were called discalced because they returned to the custom of walking bare foot.) St. Teresa had a vision for restoring the Carmelite order to its original austerity and seclusion from the world. St. John founded the first Discalced Carmelite monastery at Duruelo in 1569. There was great opposition to the reform within the Carmelite Order. He was imprisoned in Toledo by his superiors for 9 months, from December 1577 to August 1578, when he managed to escape after brutal treatment and privation. His tormentors tried to sway him from his leadership of the reform movement, which had been legitimately authorized. Nevertheless, St. John of the Cross went on with the reform and produced wonderful poetry and treatises on the spiritual life.

It may seem incomprehensible to us today that there could be opposition to such a reform that would return an order to its original vision. However, many of the men and women in convents and monasteries at the time were placed there by their families, especially if they were younger sons and daughters. A position in the Church strengthened the family’s position and avoided the costs and alliances that came with marriages. Making the best of a bad situation, many of these men and women with “enforced” vocations tried to live as comfortable a life as possible. They weren’t called to live lives of austere, silent contemplation and fought the reform.

Just as he had suffered from those opposed to the reform, St. John’s latter years would be marked by suffering from those who embraced the reform but went too far in their austerity. When he opposed and corrected their excesses, they did their best to neutralize his influence. St. John of the Cross died in 1591 after he had been denied adequate medical attention and endured isolation. It seems that much of his maltreatment by both sides was not due entirely to his authorized reform activities. He was a “converso” and considered a renegade and certainly beneath the standing of so-called “pure bloods,” who resented and were shamed by his holiness and learning.

El Greco’s “View of Toledo”

St. John of the Cross was a man of great courage, without bitterness, because his suffering never conquered him. Thomas Merton reflects on the imprisonment of St. John of the Cross in Toledo as an example of the holiness of a saint coming from grappling with the problem of evil. Why do good people suffer? Why do I suffer? His response during his inhuman imprisonment was to write a major part of one of his greatest poems on union with Christ, The Spiritual Canticle. Out of great darkness and suffering came great light and peace.

Stanzas Of The Soul

One dark night,
fired with love’s urgent longings
—ah, the sheer grace!—
I went out unseen,
my house being now all stilled.

In darkness, and secure,
by the secret ladder, disguised,
—ah, the sheer grace!—
in darkness and concealment,
my house being now all stilled.

On that glad night,
in secret, for no one saw me,
nor did I look at anything,
with no other light or guide
than the one that burned in my heart.

This guided me
more surely than the light of noon
to where he was awaiting me
—him I knew so well—
there in a place where no one appeared.

O guiding night!
O night more lovely than the dawn!
O night that has united
the Lover with his beloved,
transforming the beloved in her Lover.

Upon my flowering breast
which I kept wholly for him alone,
there he lay sleeping,
and I caressing him
there in a breeze from the fanning cedars.

When the breeze blew from the turret,
as I parted his hair,
it wounded my neck
with its gentle hand,
suspending all my senses.

I abandoned and forgot myself,
laying my face on my Beloved;
all things ceased; I went out from myself,
leaving my cares
forgotten among the lilies.

November 7 is the current feast of St. Didacus, a latinized form of the name Diego. (The traditional feast day was November 12). San Diego (1400 to 1463), was a Franciscan lay brother who exemplified the reform movement of his time. He never learned to read or write and devoted his life to prayer, penance, and the service of the poor and the sick. San Diego’s life is an ironic example of a man who found fame and posterity by renouncing them.

San Diego was born in San Nicolás del Puerto in the province of Sevilla, Spain. As a boy, he served a local hermit, taking on that austere lifestyle and raising vegetables for the poor. At 30, he joined the Franciscans and around 1441 he was sent with a small group to Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands. Despite his lack of education, he became the Guardian of the small convent. Under his leadership and by his example, the observance and piety of the group came to the attention of Pope Eugene IV. San Diego returned to Spain in 1449 and went to Rome in 1450 for the canonization of fellow Franciscan San Bernardino de Siena. There was a severe outbreak of plague in Rome and San Diego became even more highly regarded for his care of the sick and the dying. He lived at Alcalá de Henares from 1456 until his death on November 12, 1463.

San Diego became a reluctant hero, even in death, because of the number of documented miracles that were attributed to him. However, he was not canonized a saint until 1588, due to reforms that the Church was undertaking to remove the lives of the saints from the realm of legend to those of rigorous historical fact. Despite the reformed standards, the holiness of his life and documentation of miracles made his biography similar to those of devotional legend.

San Diego’s wide popularity in the 16th and 17th centuries was emblematic of a major shift in Spanish society. San Diego’s patron, Santiago (Sant Yago – St. James the Apostle), was the patron of Spain and represented her struggle to reconquer Iberia after the Moorish conquest. As Santiago Mata Moros, St. James the Killer of Moors, was a less relevant model as the Reconquest came to a close. San Diego’s example of heroic Christian virtue became a new model of the Christian ideal in the emerging union of the seven kingdoms.

When Sebastián Vizcaíno entered San Miguel Bay in Alta California aboard the San Diego in 1602, he renamed it San Diego Bay, because his men would hear Mass there on November 12. On July 1, 1769, Blessed Junipero Serra would found Mission San Diego de Alcalá on the same bay, the mission which would later give rise to the City of San Diego, California.

Although San Diego now enjoys the obscurity that he sought in life, he should be remembered and celebrated as someone who saw that mysticism and service to the marginalized could not be separated. Spirituality and social justice are the two necessary dimension of meeting and serving the living Christ.

Mission San Diego de Alcalá, San Diego, CA

St. Peter of Alcantara (1499 -1562) exemplified the spirit of the renewal and reform undertaken by the Catholic Church in the 1500′s. Even among Catholics, there can be an overgeneralized view that there were many abuses in the Church at that time and that reforms were undertaken only as a means of launching a counter offensive, called the Counter Reformation. As is always the case, life and history are more complex.

St. Peter of Alcantara was a contemporary of St. Ignatius Loyola and St. John of the Cross, and he was a confessor to St. Teresa of Avila. His life was modeled on St. Francis of Assisi. A young man, from a well-to-do and socially prominent family, he not only joined the Franciscans, but led a movement of Barefoot (Discalced) Franciscans, with a stricter rule of religious life. He was a gifted preacher, administrator, and leader who was not above washing dishes or chopping wood.

As Spain was expanding in the New World in the Golden Century (El Siglo de Oro), there was a strong movement to renew Christian life. Of course, Spain’s history was very different from the rest of Europe. Spain had been conquered by the Moors in the 700′s and the Reconquest (Reconquista) by the Christian kingdoms had just been completed in 1492. Spain was building on a 700 year Arabic and Jewish legacy that had focused on learning and asceticism. The Caliphate (the Moorish government organization based in Cordoba) united both religion and state under Islam and created a culture of immense wealth and knowledge.

St. Peter of Alcantara and his contemporaries had very little in common with the controversies that had enveloped northern Europe. Understandably, their lives had been shaped by different issues and forces. The 1500′s were a time of Christian resurgence in Iberia and of expansion overseas. The spiritual flowering of Spain occurred against a backdrop of massive change and the imposition of uniformity by the state and the Inquisition.

Yet, St. Peter Alcantara and his contemporaries led a major movement of renewal and reform that was more than conformist. Their movement would provide much of the impetus for the reform of Catholicism that would persist for 400 years.

Now that the Reformation and Counter-Reformation have formally ended, we would do well to take a closer look at St. Peter Alcantara and his contemporaries. Like them, we stand on the brink of a new era. We are leaving 300 years that played down the mystical heritage of western Christianity as a “combination of mist and schism.” St. Peter Alcantara was a mystic and a man of action. He and the other spiritual leaders of Spain’s Golden Century present us with a golden opportunity to have a vision beyond imperialism and reactionism as we face the challenges of our time.