St. Thomas Aquinas visited the church of St. Louis Bertrand (Louisville, Kentucky) — my home parish — in December of last year. Well, to be specific, his skull visited. St. Louis Bertrand is a Dominican parish. The local Dominican community arranged for this eight-hundred-year-old relic to come to Louisville from France.
St. Thomas has been a part of Sacred Space Astronomy. For example, if you have been reading SSA for a while, you will know about St. Thomas and the Two Great Lights. A quick recap: In Genesis God says, “let there be lights in the dome of the sky,” and we hear that, “God made the two great lights [the sun and moon]… and he made the stars”. But by the second century A.D., astronomers determined that stars had to be far larger in bulk than the moon, even if they appear smaller in the sky. St. Thomas in his Summa Theologica, Question 70, discussing the Fourth Day of creation, notes that “as astronomers say, there are many stars larger than the moon. Therefore the sun and the moon alone are not correctly described as the two great lights.” To this he answers, “the two lights are called great, not so much with regard to their dimensions as to their influence and power. For though the stars be of greater bulk than the moon…. as far as the senses are concerned, its apparent size is greater.” Using the principle that one true thing cannot contradict another, St. Thomas interpreted Genesis as describing the heavens as they appear to us, not as describing the moon’s absolute size, like what might be given in an astronomy textbook.
Archbishop Shelton J. Fabre of the Archdiocese of Louisville celebrated a votive mass for St. Thomas on December 10. It was very well attended. Some people drove hundreds of miles to be there. The church was full. After the mass, a vast line formed of people wanting to go up to and venerate the relic. It was a very long time before the church finally cleared out. Below are photos from the mass, including the skull and its reliquary, Archbishop Fabre, and St. Louis Bertrand pastor Fr. Bernard Timothy, O.P. (bottom row, left).
The skull of St. Thomas is not a thing that everyone is going to be drawn to. Maybe you are perplexed by a church full of people drawn to a skull, much as you perhaps are perplexed by the fact that Galileo’s finger is on display in a museum in Florence, Italy. If so, I completely understand. Nevertheless, I did find a certain draw to that which once held the eyes that saw those stars, and the mind that considered them and came to such conclusions and wrote the Summa Theologica.
Archbishop Fabre’s homily for the mass touched on a couple of points that seem particularly relevant here at Sacred Space Astronomy. The first is that God often acts through, as Fabre put it, “corporeal realities”. The “corporeal realities” he was talking about in this instance were the relics of saints, such as this skull. But as the archbishop noted, God’s action through corporeal realities goes much further, all the way to the Incarnation itself. Here is that portion of his homily:
Of course, corporeal realities are what science is all about. When St. Thomas is saying that when interpreting Genesis, we must consider what astronomers say, he is emphasizing the importance of those corporeal realities. One could, I suppose, insist that corporeal realities do not matter, that they do not really exist, and therefore one could go on to simply insist that the moon is greater than the stars in any and all senses, because Genesis says it is a great light.
Fundamentally, I think we all understand that such a viewpoint is unreasonable; it collapses in upon itself. After all, how do we know what Genesis says? We do not have its words imprinted in our minds in the manner of our instinct to breathe in and out. We learn what Genesis says because it is written in Bibles. Bibles are corporeal realities.
That brings us to the second of those two points the archbishop touched on — St. Thomas, faith, and reason (and here you will certainly notice that the full church included a fair number of people with small children!):
And so: corporeal reality, reason, faith; not a bad summary of what the Vatican Observatory is all about!
