Welcome back to the Word on Fire Show. I'm your host, Matthew Petrusic. Thank you for joining us.

Today we bring you the first half of Bishop's lecture at Charles University in Prague.

In this talk, Bishop focuses on St. Thomas Aquinas' distinctive notion

of God as Ipsum essay and its connection with some of the principal themes of Catholic social

teaching. Thomas Aquinas, who is often named among Bishop Barron's personal heroes,

was born 800 years ago this year. Enjoy.

It's obvious that Catholic social teaching developed by Pope Leo the 13th and his successors owes much to St. Thomas Aquinas.

Though he composed no classical treatise on political philosophy, his late career of Day

Regno being perhaps the only exception, Thomas managed in the course of his voluminous

writings to sum up the best of the biblical sources, the church fathers, and the classical

philosophers regarding the great themes of political thought. This made him a prime

inspiration for the modern popes as they turned to questions of property, the common good, right,

rule, just war, etc. But I wonder whether sufficient attention has been paid to the manner in which

these more practical and moral considerations are grounded

ultimately in Thomas' understanding of the source of existence. On his reading, we know who we are

and how we ought to behave at both the personal and societal level, precisely in the measure

that we have at least inchoate sense of who God is. Therefore,

Aquinas' doctrine of God is an indispensable propeudic to any consideration of his social and

political doctrine. As always with Thomas Aquinas, metaphysics comes first, and ethics follows. Accordingly in this paper,

I shall explore, however, inadequately, the relationship between Thomas' very distinctive notion of God

as Ipsum essay and some of the principal themes of Catholic social teaching. So, first part of the

paper, who God is for Aquinas.

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