Thank you, Father, Father Dominic. This evening I've chosen to focus on St. Thomas Aquinas' thought on the Blessed Virgin Mary,

her freedom, her genius, and her beauty. But before we get to those, however, I think we need to get one thing sort of out of the way.

As most people know who've read St. Thomas, who have studied him, or who have studied him,

St. Thomas Aquinas did not believe that the Blessed Virgin Mary was immaculately conceived.

So he didn't hold for the Immaculate Conception.

Now, I want to remind you that St. Thomas died in 1274, and it wasn't until 1845 that Blessed Pope Pius

the 9th declared the dogma of the immaculate conception. So it's almost 700 or 600 years later.

Whether the Blessed Mother was immaculately conceived

was an open question in St. Thomas' day

in the 13th century.

And he came down on the wrong side of history with his answer.

But to be fair, to be fair to the angelic doctor,

when he writes on this matter in his summa theologier, he uses very tentative

language. He uses phraseology like, it seems not, or it seems unfitting. The language of fittingness

to St. Thomas is language that he is always tenuous for him, in the Latin it's convenience.

It's the word he often uses when he knows that he's postulating a theory, the conclusion

of which cannot be stated with any definitive precision because there's simply not enough

data in revelation to know one way or the other.

For example, he would say that it's fitting that it's the second person of the Trinity,

the Son of God, the Logos, the Word, who assumes a human nature rather than the first person,

the Father, or the third person, the Holy Spirit,

precisely because he says it is fitting that the second person, who is the image of God, the Word,

...