Homily for the Solemnity of St Edmund of Abingdon, Principal Co-Patron Saint of the Diocese of Portsmouth. Gospel John 21:15-17.
A couple of weeks ago, the day I had been dreading most arrived, and the FedEx delivery man knocked on the presbytery door to deliver my boxes from Rome, and I was faced with the unenviable task of dragging several boxes of large and heavy books up three flights of stairs and arranging them into some kind of order. By far the largest and heaviest book on my shelf is this one: [For those reading: for the first and hopefully the last time, I used the book as a prop! Ed.] Part One of the Summa Theologica by Saint Thomas Aquinas. The Summa, which literally means summary of theology is spread out over four volumes of roughly this size. It is a monumental work covering how the Church understands God, the creation of the universe, human beings and the meaning of life, moral theology, Jesus, and the Sacraments. It’s so huge, that St Thomas Aquinas actually died before he could finish the final volume. It is perhaps the most important work of Theology ever written.
To illustrate how important this book is, when all the Bishops of the world gathered in Rome for the Second Vatican Council, to discuss and plan for the future of the Church, only two books were placed on the Altar in St Peter’s Basilica and remained there throughout every session of the Council as symbols of their importance; the first one was (obviously) the Bible, and the Second was the four volumes of this book; the Summa Theologica by Saint Thomas Aquinas.
But today isn’t the feast of St Thomas, it is the feast of two other saints. Saint Edmund of Abingdon, the patron saint of our diocese of Portsmouth, and Saint Albert the Great. These two Bishops lived at about the same time in the 1200s. They both were professors at the University of Paris, before St Edmund returned to England and moved to Oxford and St Albert moved to Cologne. These two men lived at a time in the Middle Ages where society was finally beginning to heal from the collapse of the Roman Empire and the centuries we call the ‘Dark Ages’ – where learning especially reading was restricted to Monasteries and Convents. The Church had, for centuries, preserved the knowledge of the Romans and the Greeks, and the writings of the Philosophers and the Church Fathers.
In this time of relative peace in Europe, from the 11th century onwards, when kingdoms began to form and life started to get better, we started to rebuild our knowledge of things we had forgotten, especially philosophy. The big debate in these years was over the relationship between Faith and Reason; how do we reconcile the bright ideas and reasonings of the philosophers with the truths revealed to us in the bible? Beginning with the chartering of the University of Bologna, the University of Paris, and the University of Oxford in the late 12th Century, the Popes gave official protection to academics to gather together, Masters and Students, and search after the truth in every field.
St Edmund and St Albert, and others like them, were the leading lights in the early days of Paris, and brought into the debate a little known Philosopher named Aristotle, and with him a method of looking for the truth by seeking it in the things we can see, and touch, and taste, and measure, and understand by observing the world around us.
History lesson over, why am I telling you this? Well first, because I want you to have a weapon in your arsenal when people tell you the Catholic faith is opposed to science or reason; I want you to laugh in their face when they tell you that. The foundations of their system of investigation, the very universities they sit in and listen to lectures, the universities that gave degrees to Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and give them the protection to say things like ‘there is no God’ were founded by Catholics and based on the idea that the God who is truth gave us the ability to find Him by using our own human intelligence. There would be no modern science, no enlightenment, no atheism, without the Catholic faith.
So that’s the first reason I told you all that. The second reason, is because Edmund of Abingdon and Albert the Great were, first and foremost teachers. And one of their followers, who was actually the student and assistant of Albert the Great was Saint Thomas Aquinas, who wrote this very weighty book that systematised our entire understanding of the faith. Without Edmund of Abingdon reintroducing us to Aristotle, without Albert the Great teaching him and nurturing his intellect, there would be no Thomas Aquinas, no Summa Theologica, and our intellectual understanding of the faith would be greatly diminished.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus asks Simon Peter ‘do you love me?’ and when he replies yes, Jesus tells him feed my sheep. St John Chrysostom, a Church Father, says that Jesus is teaching Peter something very important; that to love Jesus means to love the Church and to take care of it. For those of us called to be Deacons, Priests, and Bishops that means teaching and guiding people in sermons and catechism classes but that doesn’t mean ordinary Catholics also don’t have a responsibility to do the same; St Thomas Aquinas first learned about the faith in his parents’ home, he was taught from a young age the basic truths, that there is a God, who knows you and loves you, and wants you to know Him and love Him. Without this basic instruction, Thomas could not have received from St Edmund and St Albert the instruction that would turn him into the most important Catholic thinker in history.
An apocryphal story has St Thomas told by a friend, you are the greatest living theologian, and the Saint instead pointed to an old woman, kneeling down in the Church praying her Rosary, and retorted, No! That is the greatest living theologian. The example we can take from these two great teachers of the faith we celebrate today, is that we don’t know which of our children, or grandchildren, or students might be another Thomas Aquinas, but even in our own little way, by witnessing to the truth, even by just getting down on our knees and saying the Rosary, we too can feed the flock of Jesus and hand on the flaming torch of faith to another generation.
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