I was asked to speak you briefly, and then it can allow for some conversation.

And what I want to talk to you about, what I was asked to talk to you,

invited to talk to you about, based on Ryan's invitation, is the person of Thomas Aquinas,

who is one of the great medieval theologians and, yes, a great Catholic saint,

also a member of my order, the Dominican Order, which was founded a generation before St. Thomas lived.

And, of course, I've lost my own main notes for the talk, so I'm going to depend on what I've given you.

So I don't have the exact dates of St. Thomas in front of me.

And, you know, he's born, he dies in, I think, 1274.

He's 49 when he dies.

So he wrote a copious amount in a short life.

Now, just to understand a little bit about him, the Dominican order was founded in 1217 by Dominic Guzman, who was a Spanish priest, living in what would be called the time an Augustinian canonry.

Canons regular, they were priests who lived together in a cathedral, prayed together, prayed the Psalms together, ministered to the people of the region of Spain.

And Dominic was traveling through southern France in the early 1300s, 1200s, when he encountered

a group of people who were called at the time Albigensians or Cathars who were inheritors of Gnostic ideology. They believed that

the physical world was evil. The God of the Old Testament was an evil God in some sense,

who had created a world of suffering and death and warfare, and that delivery from that God

and the embrace of Jesus Christ, the embrace of a purely spiritual world.

And Dominic started a preaching band to respond to them, to preach the gospel to them, and lived, but they were people who were very critical of clergy who were lax or materialistic, and so Domic

lived the life of radical poverty to bring to them a counter witness of a person whose life

was zealously devoted uniquely to Christ.

The order expanded quickly and massively, and St. Dominic was strongly in favor of studies.

So he developed this form of life of what are called friars, let's say, consecrated men of poverty, chastity, obedience, who can change from place to place.

...