Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.

Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.

The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.

To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at to mystic institute.org.

I have watched with frankly growing amazement the intellectual might, the enterprise and the evangelistic zeal of you,

the East Coast Dominicans who have fostered a new appreciation

and love for St. Thomas, not only across the United States of America, but in the UK,

Europe and worldwide, through your scholarship, your Thomistic Institute chapters and your outstanding

online resources such as Aquinas 101.

It's a further honour for me to give this lecture across the road from and amidst faculty of,

and perhaps students of the Catholic University of America, the Great Catholic University of America,

formally established by Pope Leo the 13th on the feast day of St. Thomas Aquinas in 1889. Some 10 years earlier in 1879, Pope Leo

the 13th had of course inaugurated a Renaissance in domestic studies with his

encyclical Eternipartres, commending St. Thomas Aquinas more generally as the patron of schools

and universities and as the common doctor of Catholic philosophy and theology.

Less known, however, is Pope Leo X's lifelong devotion to Dante and that his revival of

Thomistic studies was accompanied by a programmatic revival of Dante studies, which in due course

would lead to the only papal encyclical on a poet,

Impre clara Sumorum, of 1921.

In this talk, I will first sketch the Leonine Renaissance of Dante studies and the papal promotion of Dante as a faithful disciple of St. Thomas,

of Dante the Thomist that emerged in the early 20th century.

Second, I will address Etienne Gilsson's pivotal role in the rejection of this view of Dante Tomist

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