Author: Sr. Marirose Rudek
Treasures of the Dominican House of Studies: A Look Inside the Rare Book Collection
The Dominican House of Studies houses a library that is “meant to foster serious and recollected study in the service of the Gospel.” Indeed, one can find in the library a quiet atmosphere of studiousness as students deepen their learning with scholarly diligence. The library acquires new books every month, but it also maintains a collection of rare books. Father John Martin Ruiz, O.P., head librarian, recently explained some of the special treasures that the Dominican House library holds.
“The library’s Rare Books and Special Collections consist of over 4,300 monographs, including 37 incunabula (books printed roughly between 1450-1500) and 23 manuscripts. These holdings are noncirculating. The rare book collection offers a treasure trove for research in history and in historical theology. Holdings include important works such as a comprehensive 17th-century edition of the complete biblical commentaries by Hugh of St. Cher (Hugo de Sancto Caro), a 13th-century Dominican cardinal, a copy of the Compendium theologicae veritatis, a copy of the Summa Theologica Moralis of St. Antoninus of Florence, early printed editions of Torquemada’s works, as well as other handbooks on trial procedure printed for the use of Inquisitors in Spain, and various contemporaneous Dominican theological responses to the Reformers.”
While many libraries hold rare books, we may ponder what the particular importance of preserving these artifacts might be within the Church. As the Holy See explains, “Thus, library documentation – archival and artistic – represents for the Church an irreplaceable means to put generations, which have encountered the Christian faith and life, in contact with everything that the Christian “event” has produced in history and in human thinking…To protect a book, encourage reading it, and its circulation is thus for the Church an activity very close to – if not to say one with – her evangelizing mission.” This resounds with the overall mission of the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception, through study and the cultivation of the intellectual life not for the sake of knowledge, but to contemplate truth and learn how to bring that truth to others. The Holy See cautions against considering that the holdings of ecclesial libraries be considered of minor importance or a mere luxury, because they provide for a “dialogue with humanity” between cultural heritages and Christian realities. A library where future priests are studying is especially significant as it also contributes to the formation of their awareness of the universal Church.
A few of the books in the collection are prayer books, including a beautifully illustrated liturgical manuscript from the 15th century, which once belonged to Father Edward Fenwick, the founder of the Dominican Province of Saint Joseph. Another is a prayer book from colonial Maryland. Preserving such works allows scholars to connect not just with history for its own sake, but also with the rich spiritual traditions, prayers, and beauty of our faith. As Catholics we know that tangible realities around us can convey our minds to transcendent realities. These prayer books, for example, are a reminder of the communion of saints to which we belong. “Faith is a treasure of life which is enriched by being shared (CCC, 949).”
While care must be taken to preserve the rare books collection, Father John Martin and the library staff are preparing to purchase display cases so that the books can be shared on occasion with the wider DHS community. This effort responds to the call of the Holy See to share the rich cultural heritages afforded through library collections and supports the mission of the PFIC to provide ways for students to contemplate our rich Catholic intellectual heritage.
Mass of Saint Thomas Aquinas 2026
“I pleaded and the spirit of Wisdom came to me.
I preferred her to scepter and throne,
And deemed riches nothing in comparison with her”
Towards the end of the life of St. Thomas Aquinas, he was living at the Dominican priory in Naples and was writing the questions in his famous Summa Theologiae on the Passion and Resurrection of the Lord.
As was his habit, he prayed quite early in the morning in the chapel of Saint Nicholas. The sacristan, Dominic of Caserta, was passing by, and overheard a voice coming from the crucifix: “You have spoken well of me, Thomas, what should be your reward?”—“Non nisi te, Domine — Nothing but you, Lord.”
What I love about this episode is that it helps us see the Aquinas who is not only a towering figure in the history of the Christian intellectual tradition. He is not only a genius in philosophy and theology and a sure guide for our studies.
He is above all a great saint, a man whose entire life was consecrated to Christ and who devoted all of his powers to knowing Christ better and loving him more.
Aquinas teaches us how to use our minds to encounter God. Or to put it another way, he teaches us contemplative wisdom.
What does that mean for the life of a student or a professor – for the life of a great university like the Catholic University of America?
It means that we do not only seek to know something about the highest things, about the first cause of all that is. Aquinas teaches us that the ultimate goal of our study should not be to grasp ahold of such knowledge and put it at the service of our own projects.
Rather, our goal is to know God himself – above all to know Christ and him crucified – this is the highest form of wisdom, and there is no further goal, there is nothing more to be desired than him.
Speaking for myself, my first encounter with Aquinas was in a class taught by Dr. Kevin White here at the Catholic University of America, in the year before I entered the Dominican Order.
I first recognized Aquinas’s writings as a very sophisticated system of thought (Aquinas on the passions of the soul).
But I gradually began to realize that he was describing reality.
And as I then moved into the study of metaphysics, I began to marvel at the way Aquinas was able to help me penetrate more deeply into reality – to carve reality at the joints, as Plato puts it.
I then entered the Dominican Order, not to be a Thomist, but to be a preacher of Jesus Christ in the order founded by that great vir evangelicus, St. Dominic.
As my studies progressed, I discovered that a careful training at the feet of St. Thomas is a powerful means to open the mind not only to the created reality around us, but to encounter the creator who is its source, and who has become man in order to save us.
This path is open to every human being.
But it calls for us to train our minds, even to purify them by study and also by prayer.
Even though we cannot see God face to face in this life, studying the truth – and above all, the truth about God — elevates our spirits, so that it gets some glimpse of the source of all truth, God himself.
This is very worth-while, Aquinas says: “The ability to perceive something of the highest realities, if only with feeble, limited understanding, gives the greatest joy.”1
Grace is seated in the mind, and it heals the mind, purifying it and allowing it to rise up to God. 
Beautiful passage in his John Commentary about Christ and his disciples: a. A friend desires to reveal the secrets of his heart to his friends.
In one of his homilies, Aquinas explained that we celebrate the saints with special feast days in order to honor and thank our friends in heaven, and to ask them for their special help by praying for us.
So St. Thomas Aquinas today offers you his friendship. He is like a great teacher, who not only is learned in his subject, but who cares about his students and goes the extra mile to help them – to be their friend.
So Aquinas is not only our master in the spiritual life, but also is our friend and companion on the way towards God – the journey to God that you are meant to make with your mind, as you study the truth.
He is surely pleased at what is happening at this university, and at Catholic schools around the country, which are entrusted to his heavenly patronage.
He is surely pleased at so many of you, gathered here to honor him and to learn from him.
And he surely will be pleased to intercede for us today, for this university and for all of its students, faculty, staff, friends, and benefactors. H. St. Thomas Aquinas, pray for us! Amen.
January 28, 2026
Basilica of the National Shrine, Washington D.C.
CUA University Mass
1 ScG I, ch. 8 (#49–50).
First Things Article Highlights DHS
A recent First Things article, An Anglican in the Dominican House, written by Matthew Barrett, highlights his recent visit to the Dominican House of Studies.
Was Dante a Thomist?
Dr. George Corbett thinks that most Dante scholars have been misunderstanding the Divine Comedy for a century, because of a scholarly prejudice that, in the 19th and 20th centuries, tried to suppress a major strand of interpretation of the great Italian author. Dante was not only a great poet and philosopher, but was a theologian – and, Corbett contends, he was a Thomist.
Today, most interpreters of Dante are ignorant of this tradition of Dante scholarship – and Corbett thinks it is urgent for us to recover it.
Corbett made his case at our annual Aquinas Lecture, organized for the Pontifical Faculty by our Thomistic Institute. He spoke to a capacity crowd at the Dominican House of Studies on January 20, 2026.
He has impressive academic credentials, serving as professor of theology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, and is recognized as one of the leading contemporary Dante scholars. He has published several scholarly monographs on Dante, and most recently has edited a new translation of Dante the Theologian, by famous Dominican scholar Pierre Mandonnet, O.P. (1858-1936).
For centuries, Dante was regarded as expressing the wisdom of St. Thomas Aquinas in poetic verse. Starting in the nineteenth century, however, scholars began to reject any association of Dante with the Angelic Doctor – and this view was given classic expression by Étienne Gilson.
Corbett marshaled historical, theological, and literary evidence against Gilson’s view, to show that Dante not only knew Aquinas well, but deliberately wrote within a Thomistic framework. He recalled that both Pope Leo XIII and Pope Benedict XV explicitly regarded Dante as a disciple of Saint Thomas, situating the poet firmly within the Thomistic tradition.
As evidence, Corbett pointed out that Dante gave St. Thomas one of the most prominent places in the Divine Comedy, devoting three full cantos to the poet’s encounter with the Angelic Doctor in the Paradiso, far more space than is given to any other figure besides Beatrice, Virgil, and Dante himself. Dante even describes Aquinas’s speech as the perfect likeness of Beatrice, a striking image that underscores Thomas’s role as a supreme theological guide. Most fundamentally, Corbett argued that the very structure of the Divine Comedy—its moral, metaphysical, and theological architecture—is itself Thomistic in character.
An animated question-and-answer period followed, allowing faculty and students to pursue the implications of Corbett’s argument more deeply. The evening concluded with informal conversation over wine and cheese.
The Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception is grateful to Dr. Corbett for helping us revisit—and discover anew—the Thomism of this great Catholic poet.
