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A significant Catholic moment occurred in the middle of the twentieth century.

Consider these American success stories: Catholic Archbishop Fulton Sheen's TV program Life Is Worth Living (1951-1957) reached 30 million viewers and earned an Emmy. The great French Catholic philosophers Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson taught in major, secular, American universities and developed a wide lay readership.

Trappist monk Thomas Merton's autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), became an improbable best seller. Catholic fiction writer Flannery O'Connor began a promising career with her first novel, Wise Blood, in 1952. She was soon followed by fellow Southerner Walker Percy, also a Catholic, whose first novel, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award in 1962.

Few Americans, even Catholic Americans, realize that this mid-century flourishing of Catholicism was made possible by a papal encyclical, Aeterni Patris, composed in 1879 by Pope Leo XIII. Yet, nearly all the significant figures in this movement benefited from Leo's efforts to revive Catholic philosophy by reviving the writings of Thomas Aquinas. The Catholic moment in mid-twentieth century America was very much an Aquinas moment as well.

Between the publication of his greatest works, in the mid-thirteenth century, and Pope Leo's encyclical, Aquinas's popularity waxed and waned.

Just a few years after his death, the famous Parisian condemnations of 1277 declared some of the propositions he taught contrary to the faith. In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, Aquinas's thought was at the center of fierce intellectual battles between the Dominicans, his religious order, and the Franciscans, who defended the rival ideas articulated by their leading theologians, Bonaventure and Scotus.

Despite all this, Aquinas was canonized as a saint in 1323. He has received a host of additional accolades and titles over the years as well: "universal" teacher (1317), the "angelic" teacher (1450), a "doctor" of the church (1567), and the patron of all Catholic schools (1880).

Aquinas came under attack again during the Reformation, when Martin Luther and others accused him of placing reason before faith and of leaning too heavily on non-Christian ideas. Luther, who called Aquinas both a "blind cow" and a "holy man," focused his harshest criticisms on Aquinas's fidelity to Aristotle, alleging that "the spirit of Christ does not reign where the spirit of Aristotle dominates."

During these lean years, when Aquinas took flak from Protestants and from the founders of modern science, the Dominicans kept him alive. Then the Jesuits, the most influential modern religious order, adopted him.

At the Council of Trent (1545-1563), called to reform the church from within and to clarify doctrines central to the clashes with Protestantism, his authority was so great that his Summa Theologica was placed on the altar alongside the Scriptures. Aquinas's teachings on the Eucharist, grace, and on faith and reason are intimately woven into Trent's decrees on these topics.

After the early modern period and well into the nineteenth century, Catholic philosophy was a hodgepodge of disparate elements: scholastic theology, Newtonian science, and philosophical theses from Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel. When John Henry Newman, the great nineteenth-century Anglican divine and convert to Catholicism, visited Rome, he was astounded at the lack of knowledge of Aquinas among the church's leading intellectuals.

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