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Saints for real life

Patron Saint of Students

St. Thomas Aquinas

St. Thomas Aquinas is the patron of students, universities and Catholic schools, not because study came easily to him, but because he spent his life arguing that thinking honestly and believing faithfully are the same movement of the mind.

“All that I have written seems to me like straw compared to what I have seen and what has been revealed to me.”
Said to Reginald of Piperno after December 1273, in the testimony given at the canonization inquiry
Saint Thomas Aquinas in the black and white Dominican habit, holding a book.
  • Primary patronage Students, universities, scholars
  • Feast day January 28
  • Where to visit Church of the Jacobins, Toulouse
  • Best for Students, teachers, anyone starting a hard course of study

Why students turn to St. Thomas

  • The library hall of Melk Abbey, its galleries of bound volumes under a painted ceiling. Study as a form of prayer He treated the work of understanding as something owed to God, not as a detour from faith.
  • The palm-vaulted interior of the Church of the Jacobins in Toulouse, where the relics of Saint Thomas Aquinas are kept. The hardest objection first The Summa states the strongest case against its own position before answering it. It is a method students can actually use.
  • A broad view across central Paris with Notre-Dame rising on the Île de la Cité. A student who was underestimated His fellow students in Cologne called him the Dumb Ox. Albert the Great told them his bellowing would be heard across the world.
  • The Cistercian abbey of Fossanova, where Saint Thomas Aquinas died in 1274. Knowing when to stop After an experience at Mass in December 1273 he stopped writing, and left the Summa unfinished. Learning was never an end in itself.

Start with the answer

Why is St. Thomas Aquinas the patron saint of students?

Saint Thomas Aquinas in the black and white Dominican habit, holding a book.

St. Thomas Aquinas is the patron saint of students, universities, schools and scholars. A Dominican friar and Doctor of the Church, he wrote the Summa Theologiae and held the chair of theology at the University of Paris. His feast is January 28, and his relics are kept at the Church of the Jacobins in Toulouse.

Because the patronage matches the life exactly. Thomas was a student who defied his family to join a new and unfashionable order of preachers, then spent the rest of his life in the medieval university: studying under Albert the Great at Cologne, and twice holding the Dominican chair of theology at Paris, the most demanding academic post in Europe.

The patronage is not only informal. Pope Leo XIII set Thomas at the center of Catholic study in the 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris, and the following year, in the brief Cum hoc sit of August 4, 1880, declared him patron of Catholic universities, academies, colleges and schools. Generations of students since have begun a term with his prayer before study.

What makes him useful to an ordinary student is his method rather than his conclusions. Every article of the Summa begins by stating the objections to the position Thomas is about to hold, as strongly as he can put them. He is a patron of people who are willing to be argued with, and, at the end, of people who know when the work has to be put down.

Read his full life Find a saint to follow
“All that I have written seems to me like straw compared to what I have seen and what has been revealed to me.”
Said to Reginald of Piperno after December 1273, in the testimony given at the canonization inquiry

Toulouse, Paris and the road between

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  1. Begin with the saint His life, his places, and where the Summa actually starts.
  2. A day of Dominican Rome Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the churches of the order around it.
  3. Or study in Paris The city where he taught, and where the argument was hardest.
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Photo credits
  1. Hero; Study as a form of prayer. Emgonzalez / Wikimedia Commons. Source. Public Domain.
  2. The hardest objection first; Church of the Jacobins, Toulouse. Didier Descouens / Wikimedia Commons. Source. CC BY-SA 4.0.
  3. A student who was underestimated; Paris, where he taught. Notre-Dame de Paris - View from Montparnasse Tower. Radek Kucharski / Wikimedia Commons. Source. CC BY 2.0.
  4. Knowing when to stop. ENIT, Agenzia Nazionale del Turismo / Wikimedia Commons. Source. CC BY-SA 4.0.
  5. Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Rome. Diego Delso / Wikimedia Commons. Source. CC BY-SA 4.0.