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Mass of Saint Thomas Aquinas 2026
Homily of Father Dominic Legge for the Mass of Saint Thomas Aquinas
on
January 28, 2026
in
Post
“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).
