Sanctifying Truth

17 Wisdom and Wisdom’s Fruits enacts then the first large-scale doctrinal rupture with the past, the first modern example of apply- ing the hermeneutics of discontinuity to Catholic thought and practice. The divines of the six- teenth-century Reform further detested Aquinas and what they derisively called scholastic theology. Why does Saint Thomas find an iconographic place among the Doctors of the Church? The an- swer is easy. He is the first teacher of Catholic doc- trine after the patristic period to receive officially, in 1567, the title “Doctor of the Church.” Pope Saint Pius V, another Dominican, declared him so four years after the close of the reforming Council of Trent, at which Thomas Aquinas clearly served as the Church’s Doctor Communis . This pope him- self had studied closely the works of Aquinas, so he knew that Aquinas was a carrier of the Tradition, and he knew that the Protestant Reformers were wrong to reject him. More recently, in his 1879 landmark encyclical Aeterni Patris , Pope Leo XIII set forth Aquinas as a sure guide for Catholic the- ology and philosophy. To interpret these develop- ments within the Church, we need only to recall the principle of continuity that Pope Benedict XVI once urged the Church to observe. 3 The Fathers and Aquinas exhibit continuity with the divine