As I mentioned on Saturday, now proclaimed on our webpage, Our Lady Seat of Wisdom has received accreditation. Alleluia! The little college that began with nine students back in the Jubilee Year 2000, has now been recognized by the Ontario government as a degree-granting institution.
It is significant that we heard news of this on the feast of Saint Thomas Aquinas, who is not only one of our heroes around here, but also the patron saint of Catholic schools and universities. His thought and methodology have been proclaimed and prescribed by the Church in the highest and most authoritative of terms. He is put forward as the ‘master’ of studies in documents on education and on the formation of priests in the Second Vatican Council, and is also as the primary teacher of theological studies in the 1983 Code of Canon Law. In both the Council and the Code, Thomas is the only ‘person’ spoken of by name besides Christ and Our Lady.
And here is what the great Pope Saint John Paul II had to say of Thomas in his foundational 1998 encyclical Fides et Ratio:
Saint Thomas was impartial in his love of truth. He sought truth wherever it might be found and gave consummate demonstration of its universality. In him, the Church’s Magisterium has seen and recognized the passion for truth; and, precisely because it stays consistently within the horizon of universal, objective and transcendent truth, his thought scales “heights unthinkable to human intelligence”. Rightly, then, he may be called an “apostle of the truth”. Looking unreservedly to truth, the realism of Thomas could recognize the objectivity of truth and produce not merely a philosophy of “what seems to be” but a philosophy of “what is” (#44)
So not only do I believe that the good Saint Thomas interceded for us, but that this very intercession signifies that we here at Our Lady Seat of Wisdom have been on the right path from the beginning in adopting Thomas as our own patron and guide: To incarnate the ‘method’ of the universal Doctor into our own educational methodology, to approach the ‘truth’, in all that means, with the full light of faith and reason, harmonious, an integrated and truly ‘Catholic’ or universal education.
So our gratitude to God, Our Lady Seat of Wisdom, Saint Thomas, Saint John Paul and all the saints and angels who have helped us along the way, upon which we hope to continue, forming minds, hearts and souls who are truly prepared for what will fact them in the dawn of this new millennium.