Patron Saint of Students

Why St. Thomas Aquinas?

Aquinas is the obvious choice and the patronage is formally established: Pope Leo XIII named him patron of Catholic schools and universities in 1880. He is the author of the Summa Theologiae, a work that takes objections to Christian belief more seriously than most of its critics do, stating each opposing argument in its strongest form before answering it. That method is why he remains the model for students specifically. He did not win arguments by ignoring them. Two details are worth knowing. His fellow students nicknamed him the Dumb Ox, for his size and his silence, and his teacher Albert the Great is said to have replied that the bellowing of this ox would be heard around the world. And near the end of his life, after an experience he never described, he stopped writing entirely, saying that everything he had written seemed like straw. The greatest systematic theologian in the Western Church put down his pen because he had seen something the system could not hold. For exams specifically, students traditionally turn to St. Joseph of Cupertino, who struggled academically to a degree that makes him unusually sympathetic company the night before a paper.

Who was St. Thomas Aquinas?

Thomas Aquinas was born about 1225 into a noble Italian family who had a career in mind for him, and when he chose the Dominicans instead his brothers kidnapped him and held him for a year to change his mind. It did not work.

He was large, slow-moving and silent, and his fellow students called him the dumb ox. His teacher Albert the Great said of him that this ox would one day bellow so loudly the whole world would hear it. He wrote the Summa Theologiae, among the most demanding works of theology ever produced, alongside commentaries, hymns still sung at Benediction, and the office for Corpus Christi.

What makes him the patron of students is not the output, which nobody could imitate, but the method. He states the strongest possible version of the position he intends to disagree with, and often states it better than its own defenders. The objections in the Summa are frequently more persuasive than the sources they come from, because he refused to argue against a weak version of anything.

Near the end, in 1273, something happened during Mass that he never explained. He stopped writing. Asked why, he said only that compared with what he had seen, everything he had written was straw. He died three months later, the Summa unfinished.

The feast: January 28

January 28. He is patron of students, universities and Catholic schools, and the feast is kept across the Dominican order and in academic chaplaincies with a Mass at the start of the second term. His hymns Pange Lingua and Adoro Te Devote are sung far more often than his name is spoken.

How to ask their intercession

For study, ask for clarity rather than for marks. For exams, St. Joseph of Cupertino is the traditional recourse, and the story attached to him is that he was examined on the one passage he had actually mastered. That is worth praying for and is not a substitute for revision.