Thomas Aquinas

Dominican friar, master at Paris and a Doctor of the Church, author of the Summa Theologiae, the Summa contra Gentiles and commentaries on Scripture and Aristotle. At the request of Pope Urban IV he compiled the Catena Aurea (1263–1268), a continuous gloss on the four Gospels drawn from more than eighty Greek and Latin Fathers; it supplies the Catena Aurea layer of this site. He held Mary's perpetual virginity and her sanctification in the womb, but thought her cleansed from original sin after animation rather than at conception, a point the definition of 1854 settled otherwise.