{"id":12211,"date":"2024-12-06T11:43:15","date_gmt":"2024-12-06T16:43:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/christnewstoday\/?p=12211"},"modified":"2024-12-06T11:43:15","modified_gmt":"2024-12-06T16:43:15","slug":"saint-thomas-aquinass-skull-comes-to-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/christnewstoday\/2024\/12\/saint-thomas-aquinass-skull-comes-to-america.html","title":{"rendered":"Saint Thomas Aquinas\u2019s Skull Comes to America"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_12214\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-12214\" style=\"width: 550px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-large wp-image-12214\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.beliefnet.com\/sites\/409\/2024\/12\/st-thomas-aquinas_credit-pub-dom-550x413.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"550\" height=\"413\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-12214\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Public Domain<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>US Catholics are celebrating the arrival of one of the most venerated saint\u2019s skull coming to America. Saint Thomas Aquinas\u2019s skull has resided in Toulouse, France, but has been touring throughout Europe through the past year and has now made its way to the eastern United States, beginning with Washington, DC. The tour is celebrating major milestones of the Saint\u2019s life. Last year marked the 700<sup>th<\/sup> anniversary of Aquinas\u2019s canonization, while this year marks the 750<sup>th<\/sup> year since his death, and next year marks the 800<sup>th<\/sup> year since his birth. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thegospelcoalition.org\/article\/who-was-thomas-aquinas-and-why-was-he-important\/\">Aquinas<\/a> is a revered poet and philosopher whose <em>Summa Theologica<\/em>\u00a0helped to combine faith and reason. Father Ambrose Little, OP, assistant director of the Thomistic Institute in Washington, D.C. and a Dominican friar like Aquinas was, noted the importance of the skull or relic to Catholics. \u201cFor many who are not familiar with Catholic devotion to relics, (the tour of Aquinas&#8217; skull) might seem like a macabre event. But it is important to remember that from the earliest days of Christianity, the bodies of the saints have been symbols of faith, hope and love,\u201d he told <a href=\"https:\/\/www.foxnews.com\/travel\/skull-st-thomas-aquinas-arrives-us-offers-rare-chance-view-first-class-relic\"><em>Fox News<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.cathstan.org\/faith\/relic-of-skull-of-st-thomas-aquinas-venerated-at-st-dominic-church-and-dominican-house-of-studies-in-washington\">Congregants crowded<\/a> St. Dominic Church in Washington, D.C, to see the relic and offer prayers. Over Thanksgiving weekend, the relic could be found in the Dominican House of Studies, where Father Thomas Petri offered a special votive Mass. Petri focused particularly on the importance of preserving the saint\u2019s body. \u201cWe don\u2019t believe the body is merely incidental to who we are. St. Thomas was clear. The human person is not just a soul and not just a body. The human person is a composite of soul and body. The human soul is such that it needs a body; it\u2019s ordered to a body: not only to learn, to remember, to think and to imagine, but to move, to communicate, to be visible, so to speak, in the world,\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ncregister.com\/commentaries\/skull-of-st-thomas-aquinas-preaching-in-its-presence\">he said<\/a>. He later added, \u201cSt. Thomas\u2019 soul was the form of his whole body in life, the form of this skull, in life. Jesus Christ has revealed that we will rise from the dead on the Last Day. The body, this body, this skull, is not unimportant. It\u2019s most important.<\/p>\n<p>Visitors who came to see the skull had their own reasons for wanting to venerate it. \u00a0Amy Sawka of Chantilly, Virginia, a homeschooling mother of five who is expecting her sixth child, spoke of Aquinas\u2019s educational importance. \u201cI came to ask St Thomas Aquinas for a little extra help to make the homeschool everything the children need,&#8221; she said. The skull has since moved out of the DC area and made its way to Charlottesville, VA and Providence, RI. Other stops along its tour include Cincinnati, OH, Columbus, OH, Louisville, KY, Springfield, KY, New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Its last stop in Baltimore will be December 18.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>US Catholics are celebrating the arrival of one of the most venerated saint\u2019s skull coming to America. Saint Thomas Aquinas\u2019s skull has resided in Toulouse, France, but has been touring throughout Europe through the past year and has now made its way to the eastern United States, beginning with Washington, DC. The tour is celebrating&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":462,"featured_media":12214,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fbia_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Saint Thomas Aquinas\u2019s Skull Comes to America<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"St. Thomas Aquinas&#039; skull begins a 3-week U.S. tour, offering Americans a rare chance to see a first-class relic of the 13th-century saint.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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skull begins a 3-week U.S. tour, offering Americans a rare chance to see a first-class relic of the 13th-century saint.","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/christnewstoday\/2024\/12\/saint-thomas-aquinass-skull-comes-to-america.html","og_site_name":"Christ News Today","article_published_time":"2024-12-06T16:43:15+00:00","og_image":[{"width":1200,"height":900,"url":"https:\/\/wp-media.beliefnet.com\/sites\/409\/2024\/12\/st-thomas-aquinas_credit-pub-dom.jpg","type":"image\/jpeg"}],"author":"Cecilia Buchanan","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/christnewstoday\/2024\/12\/saint-thomas-aquinass-skull-comes-to-america.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/christnewstoday\/2024\/12\/saint-thomas-aquinass-skull-comes-to-america.html","name":"Saint Thomas Aquinas\u2019s Skull Comes to 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