#St Thomas Aquinas

[andallshallbewell]

[ghostsandgod]

Human virtue is a participation of Divine power.

-St Thomas Aquinas

[angeltreasure]

“Stojan Adasevic, a Serbian abortionist when Serbia was still a communist country, managed to kill 48,000 children in utero in his 26 years as a purveyor of death.

Sometimes up to 35 per day.

But that's all on the past, as Stojan is now one of Serbia's most important pro-life voices.

As explained in a recent interview with the Spanish daily newspaper, La Razon:

The medical textbooks of the Communist regime said abortion was simply the removal of a blob of tissue. Ultrasounds allowing the fetus to be seen did not arrive until the 1980s, but they did not change his opinion. Regardless of what he believed, or thought he believed, Stojan began to have nightmares.

In describing his conversion to La Razon, Adasevic "dreamed about a beautiful field full of children and young people who were playing and laughing, from four to 24 years of age, but who ran away from him in fear. A man dressed in a black and white habit stared at him in silence. The dream was repeated each night and he would wake up in a cold sweat.

One night Stojan asked the man in black and white in his frightening dream as to his identity.

"My name is Thomas Aquinas," he responded. Stojan, educated in communist schools that pushed atheism instead of real learning, didn't recognize the Dominican saint's name.

Stojan asked the nightly visitor, "Who are these children?"

"They are the ones you killed with your abortions," St. Thomas told him bluntly and without preamble.

Stojan awoke in shock and fear. He decided he would refuse to participate in any more abortions.

Unfortunately, that very day in which he made his decision, one of his cousins came to the hospital with his four months-pregnant girlfriend―they had hoped for an abortion. Apparently, it wasn’t her first which is not uncommon in countries of the Soviet bloc.

Stojan reluctantly agreed, but, instead of the usual Dilation and Curettage (D&C) Method in which the fetus is torn apart with the use of a hook shaped knife called a curette, he decided to chop it up and remove it as a single mass.

Horrifically and providentially, his little cousin's heart came out still beating.

It was then that Dr. Adasevic realized that he had indeed killed a human being.

Stojan immediately notified his hospital that he would no longer perform abortions.

No physician in communist Yugoslavia had ever before refused to perform an abortion. The hospital and government's reaction was swift and severe.

His salary was cut in half and his daughter was immediately fired from her job. In addition, Stojan's son wasn't allowed to matriculate into the state university.

After many years of surviving the many privations orchestrated by pro-abortion/pro-death fundamentalist atheist government, Stojan was about to buckle under the pressure and give into its demands.

Fortunately, Stojan had another dream about St. Thomas.

St. Thomas assured Stojan of his friendship and Stojan was in turn inspired.

The physician became involved in the pro-life movement in Yugoslavia. In fact, he was able to get the state-run Yugoslav television station to twice broadcast Bernard Nathanson's anti-abortion film The Silent Scream.

Since then, Stojan has told of his anti-abortion stance and his reversion to the Orthodox faith of his childhood to newspapers and television stations throughout Eastern Europe. In fact, he has a strong devotion to St. Thomas Aquinas and is rarely, if ever, without the saint's books―his constant reading material.

Stojan often reminds his listeners that in his Summa Theologiæ, St. Thomas wrote that human life begins forty days after fertilization. Perhaps, Stojan would opine, "the saint wanted to make amends for that error."

Today Stojan continues to fight for the lives and rights of the unborn.”

[anastpaul]

(via One Minute Reflection – 5 November – “They shall see God.” – Matthew 5:8 – AnaStpaul)

[thecatholicbozo]

"A glance at the index to the Summa Theologica will show that everything, not only in [St. Thomas Aquinas's] theology, but his philosophy too, is centered in God. Spinoza's philosophy has a similar orientation, and so must every complete system of doctrine, for in God is to be found the ultimate explanation of the whole of knowledge.

All our ideas begin & end with God. All explanation is by universal principles, and ultimately by the First Principle. He who does not see as far as God is shortsighted, however far he may see, and he who does not view things from as far away as God is too near to see them fully.

To refer things to God is the only way to put them in true perspective and thereby to understand t hem aright. We cannot determine the essence, limits, or proportions of anything without this reference to the Supreme Being."

-A. G. Sertillanges, OP, Thomas Aquinas - Scholar, Poet, Mystic, Saint

[othmeralia]

Happy September! This floriated initial S comes from De generatione et corruptione (1520) written by St. Thomas Aquinas.

[biblically-accurate-butch]

A Prayer for the Summer Scholar

May the Lord bring peace to your heart, courage to your spirit, and wisdom to your mind.

The mind of a scholar is one of that, that never rests. To you who seek to be honorable, intergitable, and noteable in your search for truth, and knowledge, note that the Lord sees your heart. In a world full of cheats, liars, and half-doers, may those who work ernestly be fulfilled by the fruits of their labors. When you are overwhlemed by all that you are given, ask the Lord for his guidance. May he grant you the paitence to see through to your studies, and trust in your given abilities to do good, and power through stroms of uncertainy.

Do not lose yourself in worth, for grades on paper are nothing compared to what the Lord has made you out to be. Pride and Vainity are evils that lurk in the shadows of acidemia. Remember to be humble in all that you do. Be gentle to yourself for the Lord is with those who are humble in heart and modest in their words but robust in their work.

Ephesians 6:6-7 Don't work hard only when your master is watching and then shrink when he isn't looking; work hard with gladness all the time, as though working for Christ, doing the will of God with all your hearts. Psalms 56:8 You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each one in your book.

Lord as us scholars goes on throughout the day may we be reminded that it is a blessing to learn, a privilege given to us by circumstance. May we be forever grateful for the opportunity and give thanksgiving to the Lord by doing our best to best honest, ernest, hard working scholars with integrety and dedication so that we may bring good to the world in which you have given to us.

In your Holy Precious Name we pray

Holy God Holy Mighty Holy Immortal.

Amen

[the-mercy-workers]

Charity is the virtue by which we love God above all things for His own sake, and our neighbor as ourselves for the love of God.

St. Thomas Aquinas

[odetokeons]

“I've never seen so many books in all my life”

🕰️📖✨📜🕯️🌔

I've visited the Biblioteca Casanatense in Rome a few days ago and, as soon as I walked in, I felt exactly like Belle in THAT scene from Beauty and the Beast (you know the one) ♡

[portraitsofsaints]

Saint Thomas Aquinas Doctor of the Church 1225-1274 Feast Day: January 28  (new), March 7 (Trad) Patronage: Academics; against storms; against lightning; apologists; booksellers; Catholic academies, schools, and universities; chastity; philosophers; publishers; scholars; students; theologians

Thomas Aquinas was an Italian Dominican friar and priest. Also honored as a Doctor of the Church, Thomas is considered the Church's greatest theologian and philosopher. Pope Benedict XV declared: "This (Dominican) Order ... acquired new luster when the Church declared the teaching of Thomas to be her own and that Doctor, honored with the special praises of the Pontiffs, the master, and patron of Catholic schools." {website}

[inspiredbyjesuslove]

[andallshallbewell]

[ghostsandgod]

The life of pleasure places it's end in pleasures of the body, which are common to us and dumb animals, wherefore as the the Philosopher says, it is the life of a beast.

-St Thomas Aquinas

[jameslmartello]

Light in Biology: A Molecular Perspective | Prof. Matthew Wohlever

[anastpaul]

(via Quote/s of the Day – 14 September – Exaltation of the Holy Cross – the “Book of Life” – AnaStpaul)

[thecatholicbozo]

"[St. Thomas Aquinas's] holiness was intellectual, and he gave intellectual expression to the deep, mystical experiences of the greatest souls. His inner, mystical life, his secret communing with God, become in his writings so many abstract concepts, to all appearances as lifeless as the principles of geometry.

He does not use the language of a St. Teresa or a Ruysbroek or a John of the Cross. His vocation was to be a constraining and sobering influence; everything was subordinated to his proper work of teaching, which was not allowed to suffer for the sake of discussing what had no direct bearing on his teaching. The heart and the imagination must be rigorously subordinated to the intelligence.

His asceticism, his religion, his holiness, his oblation, adoration, holocaust was the right use of his reason. "The hero," says Emerson, "is he who is steadfastly concentrated," and it is in this sense that St. Thomas was a genius in philosophy, morality, and mysticism."

-A. G. Sertillanges, OP, Thomas Aquinas - Scholar, Poet, Mystic Saint