St. Thomas Aquinas was one of the theologians singled out for praise by St. Ignatius Loyola in the Spiritual Exercises (SpEx363). Ignatius learned a great deal from Aquinas while he was a university student at the Dominican college of Sainte-Barbe at the University of Paris. Ignatius wanted every Jesuit to have the same experience, so he mandated the study of Aquinas in the formation program for every Jesuit (Constitutions 464).
Pope Leo XIII approved the encyclical Aeterni Patris on this date in 1879. Its central message would have pleased Ignatius. It called for a renewal of appreciation for the thought of Aquinas, stimulated great scholarly contributions from the likes of Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain and Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange. It turns out that the driving scholarly voice behind the composition of Aeterni Patris was, himself, Jesuit-educated. That was Tomasso Maria Zigliara, and he had studied classics at the Jesuit school on Corsica before going to Rome and entering the Order of Preachers.
This is not a blog on academic philosophy or theology, and there is no room here for an excursus into the thought of Aquinas, or even an attempt to summarize it, but there is this urgent recommendation to engage with it sooner rather than later. It was extremely important for Ignatius to ensure that all the Jesuits he supervised had the best possible intellectual, rational, and scientific understanding of Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church and Catholic teaching. It’s simply not enough to be zealous in the service of Christ. One must also have wisdom, and, among the teachers of wisdom, “one stands out by far as their prince and master: Thomas Aquinas” (Aeterni Patris 17).