Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Angelic Doctor

Welcome to the Saint Coleman Catholic Church Podcast from Pompano Beach. Be sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify so that you can be notified every time we release a new episode from Saint Coleman. Welcome to the very first parish podcast episode of 2026. Well, we're so excited because this weekend is casino night. It is gonna be Saturday, which is the January 24, 07:00 to 10PM in the parish hall.

We have a lot of great prizes. There's gonna be a silent auction, and the winner of the car raffle will be announced. If you wanna know more about casino night this weekend at Saint Coleman, be sure to check out our website saintcoleman.org. And pull out your calendar so you can save the date for next month. We've got something coming up that you're gonna wanna be a part of.

Bingo night is coming back to Saint Coleman. That'll be Thursday, February 19, seven to nine in the parish hall. Now you can get tickets after all the masses the weekend of February 7, February 8. You can also check out our bulletin. There's a QR code.

You can pull out your phone, scan that, and you can also get tickets that way. We're more than halfway through the month of January, and probably most people who made New Year's resolutions might have already started to slip. As Catholics, every year on our list of resolutions should be to learn more about our faith. To grow in our faith by studying what the church teaches, and learning about the lives of the saints. One of the saints who's very inspirational, we have a feast day for him coming up later in January, it's Saint Thomas Aquinas.

Now, Thomas Aquinas is considered perhaps the greatest Catholic theologian in history. He's a doctor of the Catholic church called the angelic doctor. When you think of the greatest thinkers in Western civilization, really really two names probably come to mind right off the bat, Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas. Thomas Aquinas believed that faith and reason go together, and they they don't contradict each other. And many of the great thinkers in Catholic tradition believe this.

In fact, as recently as the nineteen nineties, Pope John Paul the second dedicated an entire encyclical to this idea of faith and reason. When you get to the enlightenment after the Renaissance, people start to wanna push away faith and go totally in the direction of reason and think of faith as something superstitious. But as Pope John Paul the second said in that encyclical in in the opening line that faith and reason are like two wings of a bird, the rise in contemplation of the truth. They go hand in hand. Thomas Aquinas built on a grouping of three virtues that also go hand in hand that we see in the writings of Saint Paul, faith, hope, and love.

Saint Paul said the greatest of these is love. And Saint Thomas Aquinas is, I believe, the first one to give those three things a the label, the theological virtues. You know, any Sunday school class that teaches kids the faith is gonna include this list of virtues, the theological virtues and the cardinal virtues. Thomas Aquinas taught us that god infuses these faith, hope, and love into us, that we can't acquire them on our own effort. The cardinal virtues were those things were talked about in Greek philosophy, you know, before the time of of the Bible.

Things like prudence, fortitude, temperance, justice, we can acquire those by human effort through working on them. But faith, hope, and love is a gift from God. Now if you had to write down a definition of each of these things, what would you write? You know, these these are things that we all kinda know what they are. We all do know what they are.

But if we had to explain it to someone who had no concept, what would we say? Well, Aquinas would teach us that faith perfects the intellect. It enables us to assent firmly to the revealed truths about God, and the divine things that surpass natural reason. For example, the immaculate conception, the incarnation, the resurrection of Jesus Christ. These things surpass natural reason, the trinity.

It surpasses natural reason. Faith is the foundation, believing in what is not seen on God's infallible authority. It is a gift that God gives us. There's that famous exchange in the Bible where someone tells Jesus, I believe, but help my unbelief. Right?

The person has gone as far as they can go. Give me more faith. So faith perfects the intellect. What is hope? Well, hope is the opposite of despair.

Hope perfects the will because it gives us a confident expectation that we will have eternal union with God one day through his mercy. Now as I mentioned, it's the opposite of despair. It it guards against falling into despair when we have the virtue of hope, but it doesn't go so far that it's presumption. Right? That god owes us something.

Right? It's hope. And the greatest of the three of theological virtues is love, or charity is another word for that. Uniting the will to god in love for his own sake above all things, and then extending that to other people. Now he said, this is a gift from God.

How does this come about? Well, the church teaches us that they are infused into us at various moments. They are poured into the soul by grace, starting at baptism. And this is why we should always remember, if we want the greatest things, we must hold close to the sacraments. Grace is infused to us not just at baptism, but at confirmation.

When we receive the Eucharist. When we come to the sacrament of reconciliation. When we approach the church and enter into the sacrament of holy matrimony, grace is infused into us, and these gifts can grow. Now as we mentioned, faith, hope, and charity, these are all gifts from God, but we do have a cooperation in them. Right?

We can work and acquire on our own cardinal virtues. God gives us freely the theological virtues, but, of course, we have to want them. And we can pursue them by being faithful to the church, attending mass when we're supposed to, praying for other people, reading the scriptures. There's a verse in the Bible, draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. So as we move through 2026, whatever your New Year's resolutions were, hopefully, one of them was to grow in your faith as a Catholic.

If not, it's not too late to go back and amend that to the list. Studying the saints is a great way to achieve that, including the great doctor Saint Thomas Aquinas. But all the saints can teach us something. And at every mass, heaven meets earth. And at every sacrament, a miracle occurs.

So as we move through 2026, let us make a goal to seek the true, the good, and the beautiful, which is ultimately God himself, and be faithful to the one holy Catholic and apostolic church. Thanks for listening to the Saint Coleman Catholic Church podcast. If you wanna be notified every time we release a new episode, you can follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And be sure to spread the word about our parish podcast.