The Aquinas Catechism: A Simple Explanation of the Catholic Faith by the Church's Greatest Theologian [Paperback]

Thomas Aquinas (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 15, 2000

The essentials of the Catholic Faith — clearly, comprehensively, and beautifully explained by one of the Church’s greatest thinkers! Although St. Thomas Aquinas was one of the Church’s most intellectually powerful theologians, few know that he also wrote a great deal that’s well within the reach of ordinary believers. In fact, as you’ll find in these pages, St. Thomas had a remarkable ability to communicate the Faith — including both its most complex and its simplest elements — in plain language. Here you’ll find his deeply insightful, straightforward, and clear explanations of the Apostles’ Creed, the Commandments, and the Sacraments — as well as of the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary. In other words, this book will give you a basic course in the Catholic Faith, taught by the Church’s greatest theologian. Let him help you gain a better grasp of Church doctrine, pray with greater fervor and understanding, receive the Sacraments more worthily, learn what God requires of you and why, explain Church teachings to non-Catholic friends, discover the scriptural sources of our Catholic Faith, find remedies for moral weaknesses that still afflict you, glimpse the greatness of the Church’s supernatural mission, and much more! Above all, let St. Thomas teach you how to explain, defend, and live your Faith . . . with the clear-sighted wisdom of a saint!

Editorial Reviews

Review

A marvelous companion and comparison document for the contemporary ChurchÂ’s Catechism. -- The Very Rev. Peter Stravinskas, editor, The Catholic Answer

St. ThomasÂ’s great influence has been a function of the simplicity and clarity of his writing. -- Karl Keating, author, Catholicism and Fundamentalism

The wisdom and life-changing power of this maxim will reverberate mightily in all who ponder the truths contained in The Aquinas Catechism. --Patrick Madrid, author of Pope Fiction and Surprised by Truth 2

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Latin

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Product Details

• Paperback: 300 pages
• Publisher: Sophia Institute Press (April 15, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1928832105
• ISBN-13: 978-1928832102
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #413,608 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

41 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thomas at his most approachable, January 8, 2003

By 

Bowen Simmons (Sunnyvale, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Aquinas Catechism: A Simple Explanation of the Catholic Faith by the Church's Greatest Theologian (Paperback)

Despite the book's title, strictly speaking, Thomas Aquinas never wrote a catechism. What he did do was give a series of sermons in 1273, which have since come to be known under the following titles:

Explanation of the Apostles' Creed

Explanation of the Lord's Prayer

Explanation of the Hail Mary

Explanation of the Ten Commandments

The Articles of Faith and the Heresies Against Each

These works have been collected together in "The Aquinas Catechism", but have also been available elsewhere individually and in different combinations ("The Three Greatest Prayers", for example, includes the first three listed works, and "God's Greatest Gifts" contains the last two).

These works differ from more typical works of Thomas in two important ways:

First, Thomas left us with no authoritative written form of them - what we have is a summary of what was said taken by a member of the audience. While that summary was likely quite faithful (the sermons were a major event ; it was recorded by a contemporary that "almost the whole population of Naples went to hear his sermons every day."), the notes should not be assumed to have been word-for-word accurate. Another factor to be taken into account with regard to accuracy is the fact that the sermons were given in the native Neapolitan dialect, whereas the written form passed down is in Latin - so this book is a double-translation (Neapolitan to Latin to English). Finally, the general medieval scribal practice of adding "clarifications" to texts they were copying further distances us from the original sermons. These factors do not mean that what we have is suspect, but it does mean that close textual analysis can only be done with great caution.

Second, the audience for these works was a general lay audience, who would not have been able to understand the specialized philosophical and theological vocabulary that Thomas generally used. As a result, these works were and are in ordinary language - no special training or preparation is required to be able to understand them. Time has not reduced their accessibility - there is nothing here that should intimidate a modern reader (there are some references to "matter" and "form" in the presentation of the sacraments, but readers do not need to understand the full Aristotelian meaning of these terms to understand Thomas's teaching).

That said, the works retain perhaps the most prominent characteristic of all of Thomas's writing, a careful and systematic thoroughness expressed through a strong structural presentation. Topics are broken down, then broken down again, and again, as needed, and each sub-sub-topic is carefully examined and clearly explained.

While Thomas always wrote clearly, he seldom did so without use of a technical vocabulary which acts as a barrier to many readers. One of the nice things about these works is that Thomas here is much more approachable, but he still is going into some pretty tough subjects. Here, for example, is part of his description of the Incarnation:

"In the first place, without doubt, nothing is more like the Word of God than the unvoiced word which is conceived in man's heart. Now, the word conceived in the heart is unknown to all except the one who conceives it; it is first known to others when he gives utterance to it. Thus, the Word of God while yet in the bosom of the Father was known to the Father alone; but when he was clothed with flesh as a word is clothed with the voice, then He was first made manifest and known."

With regard to the subject matter of these works, the subjects of the first four are easily guessed from their titles. For each, Thomas gives a careful, line-by-line reading and commentary. The last work in the collection is different from the others in two ways: first, its subject matter is not easily guessed from the title and it is not a commentary on a text - it is an explanation of the sacraments: what they consist of, and what they are for. Although the title given to this collection, "The Aquinas Catechism", is in one sense misleading, in another it is not. The range of topics covered and the method of presentation do in fact correspond with what a catechism should be. If one compares it, for example, with the recently published "Catechism of the Catholic Church", the equivalencies are immediately obvious - there is no major section of that new work that has no corresponding section in "The Aquinas Catechism" collection.

Finally, with regard to the supporting material, the editorial presence is mostly visible in how the text was formatted - the hierarchical structure implicit in the works is made explicit through use of numbers, paragraph breaks, and carefully applied highlighting. There is also a brief forward by Ralph MacInerny, a pair of outlines of the works (a brief one in the table of contents, and a detailed one in an appendix), references for all quotations, scriptural and others, and a two page biography of Thomas. There is no index, but one isn't really needed - the work is so well-structured that it is trivially easy to find almost any point of interest.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Clarity, Simplicity, and Ease of Remembrance, September 11, 2002

By 

"commentariat" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Aquinas Catechism: A Simple Explanation of the Catholic Faith by the Church's Greatest Theologian (Paperback)

This is a lovely book, edited for the modern reader, of some of the last sermons of Thomas Aquinas. It is not designed for the theologian (who has the Summa), or for the reasearcher in midaeval sermons (for it is edited and supplemented to be clear to moderns), but for the layman who wants a clear outline of the faith, from the Apostle's Creed (what do we believe?) to the Lord's Prayer and the Hail Mary(how should we respond?) to the Ten Commandments (how should we live?) to a short section on the Sacraments (How does the Church nourish us?). The kindness and holiness of Thomas shines through the book. Buy it, read it, share it.

32 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Caveat Emptor - Aquinas It's NOT, July 27, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Aquinas Catechism: A Simple Explanation of the Catholic Faith by the Church's Greatest Theologian (Paperback)

I was reviewing the section on the Sacraments in this book, specifically, the parts on the Holy Eucharist, and noticed that the 'form' (the words of consecration) of this Sacrament is exactly ICEL's MIS-translation of the Canon of the Latin Novus Ordo, and a MIS-translation of the Canon of the ancient Roman Mass. I had to ask "What did St. Thomas really say?" I went to several older translations of his work (the Summa Theologica) and this book completely mis-states what St. Thomas wrote. This is important for many reasons, but one of them is that these words of consecration have been part of internal Church contention in recent years when the new Sacraments were issued in 1970. This book should be avoided, but there are others that are more faithful translations, such as "A Tour of the Summa" by Glenn.