Photos: St. Thomas Day 2018

On March 7, 2018, members of the Thomas Aquinas College community celebrated the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas with a fitting combination of prayer, scholarship, and fun.

At 9:00 a.m. Head Chaplain Rev. Paul Raftery, O.P., offered Mass in Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity Chapel in honor of the College’s patron. “This very church, and our holy patron, and our gospel give us the direction our lives have to go as followers of Christ,” said Fr. Paul in his homily. “All of us can and ought to sow the seed of good doctrine at every opportunity in the circle of our family, or friends, and among colleagues at work, letting them see for themselves the attractiveness of truth being ready to unmask falsehood. And in this St. Thomas should always be our inspiration, that we might follow him as witnesses to the truth of our faith.”

That afternoon students and members of the faculty gathered in the newly completed St. Cecilia Lecture and Concert Hall for the annual St. Thomas Day Lecture. Dr. Steven Long, a professor of theology at Ave Maria University, spoke on the subject, St. Thomas Aquinas on the Natural Moral Law, after which the group retreated to the Dillon Discussion Room, where Dr. Long answered questions from students and tutors alike.

After dinner, the day culminated with a beloved campus tradition, Trivial and Quadrivial Pursuits, a campus-wide quiz show famous for its extravagant costumes and over-the-top displays of creative gamesmanship. Three teams, each drawn from members of all four classes, vied in a competition to answer questions drawn from the College’s classical curriculum, with a panel of tutors posing the questions.