Thomas Aquinas

A younger son of a noble family of the Kingdom of Sicily, Thomas was placed as a child at the abbey of Monte Cassino. His entry among the Dominicans, a mendicant order his family judged unworthy of him, had him kidnapped by his brothers and held a year in the family castle. A pupil of Albert the Great at Cologne, so silent that his fellow students called him "the dumb ox of Sicily", he taught at Paris, Rome and Naples. His work undertook what his century held impossible: to reconcile Christian faith with the philosophy of Aristotle, rediscovered through the Arabs and suspect to many. The Summa contra Gentiles addresses those who do not share the faith; the Summa Theologiae, left unfinished, orders the whole of doctrine into questions and objections. On 6 December 1273, after a mystical experience at Naples, he stopped writing: "All I have written seems to me like straw." He died three months later on his way to the Council of Lyon. Canonised in 1323 and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1567, he was named by Leo XIII in 1879 the master of Catholic thought.