Diego Velázquez, The Temptation of St. Thomas (1632): angels fit Aquinas is fitted with a mystical chastity belt.
“Pray [for wisdom] in the presence of the skull of St. Thomas Aquinas.”—Father James Brent, OP
Tommaso d’Aquino died in Italy
seven and a half centuries ago.
Thinking, no doubt (as in that Monty Python show): “No time to lose!”
Urban V, last of the Avignon popes,
stashed his saintly relics in Toulouse.
(Toasting him in Châteauneuf-du-Pape
infallible Pio Nono approved no fool:
Urban's last reported words had been:
"Piquepoul, Piquepoul!”)
Tommaso’s brothers hired the boy a whore,
but he'd vowed his naughty parts away.
To the Church, he bequeathed his
Summa Theologiae—
three thousand Articles the bishops' score.
Dismissing such vanities as "straw,"
Tomasso hence wrote little more.
He levitated with aplomb, though, when
the plummet holder was the BVM.
Next week Aquinas's skull will be visiting our town.
We’re short an icon since we ditched TJ and Robert E. Lee.
The Angelic Doctor's name is down
(but City Council leans, alas, to rapper Lil' Me).
Now let us pray.
Notes: OP = Order of Preachers, a Catholic mendicant order; Pio Nono = Pope Pius IX (r. 1846–78), proclaimer of the doctrine of papal infalliblity; Piquepoul = a grape variety blended in Châteauneuf-du-Pape; BVM = Blessed Virgin Mary.