Who was St. Thomas Aquinas?
Thomas was born at Roccasecca, in the Kingdom of Naples, in 1225 or 1227. The Catholic Encyclopedia says the end of 1225 is the date usually given; Benedict XVI, speaking in 2010, placed his birth between 1224 and 1225. His father was Landulph, Count of Aquino; his mother, Theodora, Countess of Teano. At five he was sent to the Benedictine monks of Monte Cassino, where his parents hoped he would one day be abbot. He went on to the University of Naples, which the emperor Frederick II had founded; the Catholic Encyclopedia dates the move to about 1236, Franciscan Media to 1239. There, Franciscan Media says, he first met the philosophy of Aristotle.
Then he did something his family had not planned. Sometime between 1240 and 1243 he took the habit of the Dominicans, a young order of begging preachers. His mother objected. His brothers seized him on the road near Acquapendente and kept him in the family fortress at Roccasecca for a year and a half or two years. He did not change his mind. The sources tell the next step differently. The Catholic Encyclopedia says John the Teutonic, master of the order, took him to Paris and, according to most biographers, on to Cologne, where he arrived in 1244 or 1245 and was placed under Albert the Great; in 1245 Albert went to Paris and Thomas went with him as a student. Benedict XVI, in 2010, had him sent to Paris in 1245 to study under Albert and later follow his teacher to Cologne. Either way, Albert was the teacher. His classmates took his silence for slowness. Then Albert heard him defend a difficult thesis and said, in the Encyclopedia's words: "We call this young man a dumb ox, but his bellowing in doctrine will one day resound throughout the world."
He twice held a professorship at Paris, lived at the court of Pope Urban IV, directed Dominican schools at Rome and Viterbo, defended the mendicant orders against their critics and argued against the Averroists. He began his great work, the Summa Theologiae, in Rome between 1265 and 1268. It was never finished. On December 6, 1273, after celebrating Mass, he stopped writing. When his friend and secretary Reginald urged him to go on, he answered that everything he had written now seemed to him like straw beside what he had seen. In January 1274 he set out on foot for the council Pope Gregory X had called at Lyons, fell ill near Terracina, and was carried to the Cistercian abbey of Fossanova. There, on March 7, 1274, he died. He had lived less than fifty years.
John XXII canonized him on July 18, 1323. St. Pius V proclaimed him a Doctor of the Universal Church in 1567. The Church calls him the Angelic Doctor and the Common Doctor.
Why Catholics pray to St. Thomas Aquinas for students and for faith
On August 4, 1879, Leo XIII published the encyclical Aeterni Patris on the restoration of Christian philosophy. "Among the Scholastic Doctors," he wrote, "the chief and master of all towers Thomas Aquinas." One year later to the day, in the Brief Cum hoc sit of August 4, 1880, the same pope declared him patron of Catholic universities, academies, lyceums and schools. Pius XI, in the encyclical Studiorum Ducem of 1923, called him the patron of all Catholic schools and asked that his feast be a holiday for students, kept with a solemn Mass and, at least in seminaries and religious houses, with a disputation in his honor. This is one of the few patronages on this site that rests on a papal document. Students were not named in it. They claimed it anyway, and the Thomistic Institute's novena to him ends on a day it calls him patron of students.
The deeper reason is the way he worked. The Encyclopedia records that he began every period of study with prayer, that he added fasting when a passage of Scripture would not open to him, and that he told Reginald he had learned more from prayer than from men or books. Benedict XVI described him at prayer before the crucifix in the early morning, asking whether what he had written about the mysteries of the faith was correct. A student praying to St. Thomas is not asking for a shortcut past the work. She is asking for what he asked for: a clear mind, a reliable memory, and the humility to begin with God.
The same man is a friend to anyone whose faith has been shaken by a hard question. He spent his working life on hard questions, and he never stopped praying while he answered them.
How to pray to St. Thomas Aquinas
Pray to him the night before the exam, the morning of the interview, or any day the work in front of you feels larger than your mind. His feast is January 28, an obligatory Memorial on the General Roman Calendar; it is the day in 1369 when his body was carried from Fossanova to the Dominican church at Toulouse. The nine days before it, January 19 to 27, are a natural time for a novena, and the Thomistic Institute publishes one.
Say the prayer below before you open the book, not after you close it; Pius XI published it as the prayer Thomas himself used. Then do the work. His own order was prayer first, then study. If fear is the real problem, bring it to Confession or to a priest you trust, and bring it to a doctor or a counselor if the anxiety is making you ill; a saint's prayer accompanies that help and does not replace it. If the trouble is a doubt about the faith, read him. Ask your questions out loud. He did.