What I want to talk to you about briefly, mostly from notes, and then we'll have some

time for Q&A, is why Aquinas matters in our world today in the church, but also in the

larger civic and secular society.

I think probably many of you have read T.K. Chesterton's book Orthodoxy, and you know about

that passage where he says human beings in the modern West are like people who don't know their own heritage, and need to discover to do

as something strange. They're like men who lead their home country of England, and they need

to travel around exotic countries, and then rediscover the island they live in and discover

how interesting and strange it is, and then learn to love it again, And that's what we need to do with our arts of Christianity.

I would say that is very much the case, though, in particular for Catholics of Artists

to St. Thomas' acquaintance.

He is among us as the stranger who lives in our home, who helped build it,

who knows all its architecture quite well, who none of us speak to,

and few of us know well, and we find him daunting. But we're in a happy situation with the

blindness, and that's to give a kind of popular example from culture. There's that great Freudian

moment in the Empire Strikes Back, where Luke, Luke Skywalker is being defeated by his terrible

enemy and nemesis, Darth Vader, and Darth Vader looks at him and says that line which marks

some of us for our holy. I am your father, and you know, that's sort of a wonderful cyclical

analytic. People love that, because this is a relation to fathers aren't there but what we were

discovered that we were we who thought we were orphans discovered that our father

was Thomas the client and that we who know so little our own doctrinal intellectual

tradition have discovered that actually our father is a person in criminal wisdom and grandeur of thought

and insight and we have to learn from him and then the room will become radiant with clarity

...