Kevin Vost - 12 Life Lessons from St. Thomas Aquinas: Timeless Spiritual Wisdom for Our Turbulent Times

KEVIN VOS T , PS Y . D.

12
LIFE LESSONS
FROM
ST. THOMAS
AQUINAS

Timeless Spiritual Wisdom
for Our Turbulent Times

SOPHIA INSTITUTE PRESS
Manchester, New Hampshire

Copyright 2019 by Kevin Vost

Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved.

Cover by David Ferris Design in collaboration with Perceptions Design Studio.

On the cover: engraving of St. Thomas Aquinas, by Cornelis Boel (XJF368406) Bridgeman Images; leather texture background (581166247) Ivaylo Ivanov / Shutterstock.

Foyer illustration by Ted Schluenderfritz.

Except where otherwise noted, Scripture quotations have been taken from the Catholic Edition of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible (RSV), copyright 1965 and 1966 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpts from the English translation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church for use in the United States of America copyright 1994, United States Catholic Conference, Inc.Libreria Editrice Vaticana. English translation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church: Modifications from the Editio Typica copyright 1997, United States Conference of Catholic BishopsLibreria Editrice Vaticana.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Vost, Kevin, author.

Title: 12 life lessons from St. Thomas Aquinas : timeless spiritual wisdom

for our turbulent times / Kevin Vost, Psy.D.

Other titles: Twelve life lessons from St. Thomas Aquinas

Description: Manchester : Sophia Institute Press, 2019. Includes

bibliographical references. Summary: Twelve lessons, based on the

teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas, on how to live virtuously in our

turbulent times Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019031538 ISBN 9781622828302 (paperback) ePub ISBN 9781622828319

Subjects: LCSH: Thomas, Aquinas, Saint, 1225?-1274. Christian

life Catholic authors.

Classification: LCC B765.T54 V6135 2019 DDC 248.4/82 dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019031538

To all who seek to know truth and do good

Whatever is true, whatever is honorable,
whatever is just, whatever is pure,
whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious,
if there is any excellence,
if there is anything worthy of praise,
think about these things.

Philippians 4:8

Contents

Introduction:

Conclusion:

Introduction

Turbulent Times in Need of Timeless Wisdom

Turbulent Times in Need of Timeless Wisdom

Help, L ord , for there is no longer any that is godly; for the faithful have vanished from among the sons of men.

Psalm 12:1

He who walks with wise men becomes wise.

Proverbs 13:20

Our Turbulent Times

I strive to write positive, uplifting books that inform and inspire readers with the kind of love of God and His Catholic Church that was restored to me after twenty-five years in the atheistic wilderness, courtesy of the stirrings of the Holy Spirit and the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. I certainly hope to do the same in this one, but the last thing I want to do is offer haloed-smiley-face Band-Aids to place over the festering sores of our individual souls, of our culture, and, alas, of elements within our holy Church. All times have been turbulent in the two millennia of our Churchs history, as the Church consists of sinners seeking holiness, but today the waves of ambiguity and aimlessness, of confusion and chaos, of scandal and secularization, are cresting at all-time highs into a very imperfect storm that puts all our souls at serious risk of spiritual shipwreck. These issues cannot be ignored.

There are all kind of indices of these troubled times within the world at large. You need only turn on your television, your computer, or even your cell phone, to see new examples of turmoil and conflict every day, but alas, such bad news is found not merely outside in the world of the worldly, but within the very bosom of the Catholic Church .

The Church in America had suffered and shrunk in so many ways decades before the clerical sexual abuse crisis reared its ugly head again in 2018. Since my childhood in the 1960s, the number of priests has decreased by one-third, while the U.S. population increased by two-thirds. We have more than 40 percent fewer Catholic schools, while parish after parish proceeds to shut its doors.

Weve seen similar catastrophic drops in the numbers of male and female religious. Of those who are left, some remain gallant defenders of the Church, while others gave up the habit of boldly proclaiming unpopular Catholic truths, such as the sanctity of life and of marriage, at the very same time they gave up the habits they wore on their backs, becoming more like social workers or political and economic activists than servants of God seeking the salvation of their souls and of the souls of others.

In Europe, vast numbers of majestic cathedrals sit nearly empty. To the present day, the number of U.S. Catholics has risen pretty much in keeping with our rise in population as a whole, largely due to Catholic immigrants, yet the largest Christian denomination in our country comprises former Catholics.

I came to realize only in the last few years how often during the years of my childhood and adolescence within the Church and my young adult years outside of it that we were told again and again how the Church needed aggiornamento , serious changing and updating, to adapt to modern man or contemporary man, to come to speak our language today and become relevant to the complexities of our time. Since my return to the Church in 2004, those winds of change have reached almost gale force, and yet, ironically, those modern men (and women) of the 60s and 70s are certainly no longer very modern.

Their winds of change brought us barn-like churches, dislocated tabernacles, and laity-crowded sanctuaries and blew away high altars and altar rails, Latin, chants and bells, and statuary and religious art. It is no pretty thing when the winds of modernist wolves huff and puff and blow through the houses of God, and less pretty still when we breathe them into our souls through ambiguous, novel doctrines that seek to conform the eternal Spirit of the Church to the spirit of the modern world.

This deterioration of the Church within my lifetime can give rise within me to feelings of sadness, and even anger at times, prompting me to call out like King David: Help, L ord , for there is no longer any that is godly; for the faithful have vanished from among the sons of men (Ps. 12:1). Still, as a Thomist immersed in St. Thomas Aquinass philosophy, theology, and knowledge of human nature, I remind myself that we are never completely at the mercy of our feelings, even if they appear justified to some extent by external circumstances. God made us in His image with intellects and wills. He gave us both the intellectual capacity to understand the gravity of any problems that we face, and the will to try to make things right, if like David, we ask God for His help. So, although there is no need to be overly pessimistic, even in our turbulent times, we may legitimately ask ourselves where perennial, eternal truths have gone, and where saintly and godly men and women are? Can we find them again? Can we become them again?