Saint Thomas Aquinas, whose feast day on the new calendar was yesterday, died at the age of forty-nine in the Cistercian monastery of Foss-Nuova on his way to the second ecumenical council of Lyons. He died on the seventh of March, 1274, exactly two months before the council opened. Even though, just a few months before, the saint had put away his pen, vowing never to write again on account of what had been revealed to him at Mass during a long ecstasy, and even though he was preparing for death, Pope Gregory X summoned his presence, telling the doctor to bring his treatise “On the Errors of the Greeks.” One of the reasons for the calling of the Council was to draw up a profession for the reunion of the schismatic Greeks. Also invited was Saint Bonaventure. The “seraphic doctor” died during the council on July 15.
One of my favorite stories about Saint Thomas wasn’t something that happened during his life, but after his death: it was the unwillingness of the Cistercians, in whose monastery he died, to release his body to the Dominicans. In addition to being so renowned a theologian, Saint Thomas was considered by all Christendom to be a saint during his own lifetime. Before Saint Thomas left for Lyons he knew that he had only a short time to live. Falling ill on the journey he was taken to his niece’s castle, the Countess Francesca Ceccano in Terracina. The Cistercians nearby heard of it and sent a request for the doctor to rest and recuperate with them.Thomas immediately accepted the invitation, preferring that if he was to die at this time that he should die among religious. These hospitable monks who took care of him in his final days considered it more than a blessing from God that the angelic doctor should die within their walls, they considered it a manifestation that the will of God wanted the saint’s relics to remain with them. In fact, Master Thomas had quoted a Psalm to Father Reginald, his companion and secretary, as he was being carried into the monastery: “This is my rest for ever and ever: here will I dwell, for I have chosen it” (134:14). And it almost was.
The canonization of Thomas Aquinas was one of the fastest in the history of the Church. Pope John XXII, one of the Avignon popes, raised him to the altar in 1323, only forty-nine years after his death. His body remained with the Cistercians for almost a century, until Pope Urban V, on January 28, 1369, ordered his remains transferred to the Dominican church in Toulouse, France. During the French Revolution his body was removed to the church of Saint Sernin, where it now reposes in a sarcophagus of gold and silver. The forearm bone of his left arm is preserved in the cathedral of Naples. That of his right arm, in the Dominican church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva in Rome.
