Religious in the Local Churches: Pointers from Aquinas

Abstract

The saint we are honouring today would have found the theme of this lecture all too familiar. St Thomas Aquinas was personally involved in the lively, indeed fierce, medieval debates that surrounded the first appearance of the Franciscan and Dominican friars in the life of the Church. Then, as before and since, religious did not always fit in immediately or obviously into the established patterns of diocese and parish. At the time of St Thomas some argued that all the attributes of the antichrist and his ministers were to be found in the new Mendicant Orders. In Cambridge there survives a medieval manuscript with an illumination showing Archbishop FitzRalph, its author and a critic of the friars, faced by Mendicant friars mingled with devils. At about the time St Thomas was writing his first polemical work, soldiers had to be sent to protect the Paris Dominicans at Saint-Jacques from riots and demonstrations. Troops had to patrol his inaugural lecture, and on Palm Sunday 1259, as he preached, St Thomas was heckled by someone trying to get a hearing for the seculars’ case. No wonder that he went into the matter of when and by what means religious can defend themselves.St Thomas’s own experience as a Dominican friar was gained in different dioceses, indeed in different countries. He dealt repeatedly with the position of religious in the Church, especially in three polemical works, in Quodlibetal disputations and in the Summa Theologiae, going well beyond the controversy over the organisation of university teaching in Paris. To guide our own exploration, we might do well to start with how St Thomas approached the task. Some problems have a way of recurring. In particular, he had to fight against two errors, the kind of mistakes still made today.