17 October 2026
Summa Contra Gentiles, Book III: XVII That All Things Are Directed to One End, Which Is God
Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 7 March 1274), was a Doctor of the Church, Philosopher, Theologian, Jurist, Dominican Friar, and Priest. Known as Doctor Angelicus "Angelic Doctor," and the Doctor Communis "Universal Doctor" his writings serve as a defense and proof of the validity of Christ's authority over all. The Summa contra Gentiles (also known as Liber de veritate catholicae fidei contra errores infidelium, "Book on the truth of the Catholic faith against the errors of the unbelievers"). The Summa contra Gentiles consists of four books. The structure of Saint Thomas's work is designed to proceed from general philosophical arguments for monotheism, to which Muslims and Jews are likely to consent even within their own respective religious traditions, before progressing to the discussion of specifically Christian doctrine.
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From Closer to Truth, a secular source.
Jesus Revealed His Heart to Margaret Mary, but It Was This Saint Who Brought It to the World
He revealed His Heart to St Margaret Mary, but it was her spiritual director, St Claude, who made the world aware of her visions and promoted devotion to it.
From Aleteia
By Larry Peterson
Our Lord promised the visionary a faithful servant and perfect friend.
Claude de la Colombiere was born in 1641, in the old province of Dauphine, in France. He was the third child of Bertrand Colombiere and Margaret Coindat. Soon after Claude was born, the family moved to the town of Vienne, and this is where the young boy began his education. It was during this time period that Claude began feeling the call to the Jesuits.
Claude began his secondary studies at the Jesuit school in Lyon. He was now 17 and wrote in his journal that he had “a terrible aversion for the life embraced.” Later on, those who knew him attributed those comments to his being away from home and missing his family, to whom he was very close. Plus, he loved the arts, literature and active social life. But the selfless side of Claude won out, and he entered the Jesuit novitiate at Avignon. Here he finished his studies in rhetoric and philosophy.
In 1666 he went to the College of Clermont in Paris to study theology. He took his first vows and completed his studies in philosophy. He became a professor of grammar and literature and stayed in that position for the next five years. Well known for his tact, poise, and devotion to the humanities, Claude was appointed by his superiors as tutor for the children of France’s Minister of Finance, Jean Baptiste Colbert. Unknown to Claude, God had bigger plans for him.
Claude was now a priest and returned to Lyon. Here he taught in the college and became a full-time preacher and also the moderator of several Marian congregations. After 15 years as a Jesuit, Father Colombiere began his probation in a Jesuit’s final spiritual formation. This was known as the Tertianship, and it would be the final pathway for the priest to his still unknown destiny.
Upon Father Colombiere’s profession of solemn vows, he was named rector of the College at Paray-le-Monial. Most people who knew of Father Colombiere wondered why such a talented priest would be sent to such an unknown and obscure place. The answer was well known to the superiors who sent him.
The reason was for him to see a simple, humble nun at the Monastery of the Visitation. Her name was Margaret Mary Alacoque. The reports were that she told her superiors that Jesus was appearing to her and revealing the secrets of His most Sacred Heart.
Sister Margaret Mary was being spurned by the other sisters and ridiculed. She agonized over and was uncertain of what was actually happening. Jesus had told Sister Margaret that He would send her the “faithful servant and perfect friend.”
Sister Margaret Mary had endured much because of the disbelief of the other nuns at the monastery. She felt isolated and alone, even though she had been chosen by Christ Himself to spread devotion to His Sacred Heart. When Father Colombiere arrived at the monastery and began hearing the confessions of all the nuns, Sister Mary Margaret knew the “faithful servant and perfect friend” that Jesus had promised her had finally come.
She willingly confided in Father Colombiere and opened her heart to him. After speaking and meeting with her a number of times Father Colombiere was convinced of the truthfulness and the validity of her visions. He became her most ardent supporter and apostle for her and devotion to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus.
Father Colombiere left Paray in 1676 and headed for London. He kept in touch with Sister Margaret Mary by letter. He had been assigned to be the preacher to the Duchess of York and later, to the Queen of Great Britain. He even took up residence in St. James Palace.
Colombiere’s belief and loyalty to his Catholic faith never wavered, even under the intense pressure against the Catholic faith in England. In 1678 he was accused and arrested as one of those involved in the fictional popist plot designed to overthrow King Charles II. He spent over three weeks in squalid prison conditions weakening his frail health to the point of no return.
After his release, in 1679, he was sent back to Paray. Father Colombiere died on February 15, 1682, from a severe hemorrhage. He was only 41 years old.
Jesus had appeared to St. Margaret Mary revealing His wishes for devotion to His Sacred Heart. But it was St. Colombiere who helped the quiet, humble visionary announce it to the world. Father Claude de la Colombiere was canonized a saint on May 31, 1992, by Pope St. John Paul II.
St. Colombiere, please pray for us. His feast day is February 15.
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God Is Passionately in Love With You, According to St Margaret Mary Alacoque
Today is her Feast Day. She is known as the "Apostle of the Sacred Heart", because Christ revealed his Heart to her nd told her to promote devotion to It.
From Aleteia
By Philip Kosloski
He cannot contain his love and desires to pour it out upon us all.
When we think about God's love, we don't always use the word "passion." Yet, those were the exact words Jesus used when describing his love for humanity in a private revelation to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, a religious visionary of the 17th century.
It was during the first revelation about devotion to Jesus' Sacred Heart, and this is how the vision began. The saint recounts:
Once being before the Blessed Sacrament and having a little more leisure than usual, I felt wholly filled with this Divine Presence, and so powerfully moved by it that I forgot myself and the place in which I was. I abandoned myself to this Divine Spirit, and yielded my heart to the power of His love. He made me rest for a long time on His divine breast, where He discovered to me the wonders of His love and the inexplicable secrets of His Sacred Heart, which He had hitherto kept hidden from me.
Then Jesus spoke to St. Margaret Mary as she lay near to his heart.
My Divine Heart is so passionately in love with [humanity] that it can no longer contain within itself the flames of its ardent charity. It must pour them out by thy means, and manifest itself to them to enrich them with its precious treasures, which contain all the graces of which they have need to be saved from perdition.
This is one of the reasons why Jesus revealed himself with his heart outside of his body. This symbolizes how Jesus could not contain his love for us and his heart literally burst through his chest, a symbol of his passionate love.
Many saints have similarly reflected on Jesus' love, connecting it to the book in the Old Testament titled the Song of Songs. In it lovers unite in rapturous delight and represent the intense love that God has for each one of us.
The revelation of Jesus' Sacred Heart to St. Margaret Mary is a great reminder to us, dispelling any false images of God we may have. He is not an angry Zeus looking to destroy us, but a lover, who desires our souls, hoping to fill them with his joy.
16 October 2026
The Decade That Broke American Catholicism
: The King of Kings Over Rome and All Nations
From One Peter Five
By Timothy Flanders, MA
In the public order, the rights of God must be maintained.
Editor’s note: this is an excerpt from the author’s book City of God vs. City of Man: the Battles of the Church from Antiquity to the Present.
Read part I: "The Bishop’s Altar is the Throne of Christ the King in every City-State-Nation"
Rome
While all this was happening in Armenia, the final attacks of Satan were poured out through Diocletian and his successors, who, says Eusebius, are punished by God with plague, famine and war.[1] Constantine was roused by God to punish the evildoers and received the vision In Hoc Signo Vinces “In This Sign Conquer.” In this God showed a pagan emperor that the only power is in the Cross, not in force of arms. Thou comest to me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a shield: but I come to thee in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, which thou hast defied (I Kngs. xvii. 45). With the banner of the Cross, Constantine’s army rallied the crusading spirit to crush to usurpers.
In 313 the Edict of Milan ended Christian persecution in the Roman Empire.[2] Then the victorious Church already manifested in Armenia continued for Rome. With his mother St. Helena, Constantine rebuilt the great city of Jerusalem and “cast down the idols and the temples which were found there” so that “Jerusalem which had presented a horrible mass of ruins was then adorned with most numerous and magnificent churches.”[3] By a miracle of healing, the True Cross was found and raised up as the new sign of power against the usurpers at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.
The public funding of churches is the manifestation of the King of Kings over the public order: the pagan Roman emperors had built the royal stoa (“basilica”) for the glory of their names. Constantine built the basilicas of Old St. Peter’s, St. Paul’s Outside the Walls, and St. John Lateran for the glory of His Holy Name. “The splendor of political dominion over the world was united to the transfigured splendor of holy Rome.”[4] Meanwhile, he built a new city on the Bosphorus as a Christian city, New Rome, and built the church of Hagia Eirene “Holy Peace.” But coins were already being minted exalting the city in his name.[5]
All Nations
And while Constantine and Tiridates were building churches to the King of Kings, St. Frumentius was converting King Ezana of Ethiopia. This kingdom too embraced the true King and converted the public order to His rule.[6] Together they ratified a Christian people with the building of St. Mary of Zion, trampling on the old throne of Satan.[7]
In neighboring Georgia, the devout woman St. Nino was taken captive by the Iberians (Georgians) around 327. Through the providence of God she healed the king’s wife and they were miraculously converted and spread the Gospel. And “the king having ascertained from his prisoner the plan on which churches were constructed among the Romans, ordered a church to be built, and immediately provided all things necessary for its erection; and the edifice was accordingly commenced.”[8] And, thus, the historic Svetitskhoveli Cathedral was built.
Within a few generations of this, a young boy from Roman Britain named Patricius became a victim of the Celtic slave raiders of Ireland. St. Patrick understood his captivity as a punishment from God for his own faithlessness.[9] Through God’s intervention, he was converted and escaped back to Britain.[10] Here he received a vision from God to leave Roman Britain and bear “many persecutions, even chains, so that [he] could give up [his] freeborn state for the sake of others.”[11]
Patrick lamented the slavery of the Irish to demons: “Never before did they know of God except to serve idols and unclean things.”[12] They are “fellow-citizens of demons, because of their evil works. By their hostile ways they live in death.”[13] They were under the dominion of shamans using music to commune with demons. But as Patrick returned to the island they prophesied “by their magical art,” the coming of “a kingdom” that would “destroy all their gods, banish all the works of their craft, and reign for ever.”[14] The pagan cultus (their “greatest feast day”) coincided that year with the Easter celebration that forbade the lighting of fires in their superstition.[15]
When St. Patrick lit the Easter Fire in defiance of the usurping demons, the shaman druids cried out in fear to the pagan king that “the kingdom that has been brought upon by him will overpower us all and you, and will seduce all the people of your kingdom, and all kingdoms will yield to it, and it will spread over the whole country and will reign in all eternity.”[16] The King then proceeded with his chariots and horseback to challenge Patrick, but he met them while uttering the verse some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we will call upon the name of the Lord our God (Ps. xix. 8). One of the druids blasphemed God openly to Patrick, against whom Patrick immediately pronounced a curse as St. Peter did and he died.[17]
At this the king roused his men to kill St. Patrick but he called upon God Who sent darkness and an earthquake while the pagans were thrown into chaos and started to kill one another. Then a showdown of miracles happened between the chief druid and Patrick. The druid, “through the invocation of demons,” performed miracles of bringing snow and fog.[18] When Patrick commanded him to remove these, the druid could not.
“You can do evil and cannot do good. Not so I.” Then he blessed the plain all around, and in no time, without rain or mist or wind, the snow vanished, and the crowds cheered and were greatly astonished and touched in their hearts.[19]
The druid finally tested Patrick by an ordeal of fire, and the druid was killed. As the “wrath of God” began to fall upon the pagans, the king then converted with “many others” and “preached everywhere” working miracles.[20] He “destroyed the idol at Leitrim the idol, Crom Cruach,” and continued on throughout the whole island:
Entering into a pagan territory he first preached to the chief men, knowing that when they were converted the people would follow. Wonderful indeed was his labour, and wonderful its results. He preached in almost every district in Ireland, confounded in argument the druids and won the people from their side; he built, it is said, 365 churches and consecrated an equal number of bishops, established schools and convents, and held synods; and when he died the whole machinery of a powerful Church was in operation, fully equal to the task of confirming in the faith those already converted and of bringing those yet in darkness into the Christian fold.[21]
He established a native clergy from the chieftains and by the 600s, paganism “had all but disappeared.”[22] After learning Latin the Irish Church developed a written script for their native tongue in Gaelic and began to send missionaries to Europe. St. Patrick would be known in Irish as Pádraig.
Thus by the preaching of the Logos and the working of the Holy Spirit, Ireland was converted to the Faith and began to offer cultus to the true King. The public order would henceforth receive the cultural momentum not from the voluntarist demons, but from the Logos Incarnate. Thus from the eastern border kingdoms of the Roman Empire, Georgia and Armenia, to the southern extremities in Ethiopia, and the northwest in Ireland, the saints understood that the public cultus of demons must be overthrown, and the throne of the King of Kings raised in its place.
The Public Cultus
St. Thomas says of the cultus that “at all times and among all nations there has always been the offering of sacrifices… and consequently the offering of sacrifice is of the natural law.”[23] Every people has offered cultus to the divine in a public act of the ruling government because this is the dictate of natural reason. The people received therefrom their principle of moral order.
Before the Gospel peoples offered cultus to false gods and fell into bondage to voluntarism, as the demons enslaved them to the “freedom” of their own will from logos. But the universal teaching of the saints was to transfer this public cultus from the false gods to the true God. This was due to the fundamental truth that human nature was wounded by Original Sin. Therefore divine grace was necessary for the public order, and hence the public cultus. Without this public supplication for divine grace, man, being ordered by natural reason to worship, would fall once again to the bondage to demons. The public cultus was the declaration of freedom from demonic occupation.
Just as it had been for the family in the private order, the public cultus would become the fundamental root of Christian culture everywhere, which began to form Christian peoples, the symbolic act of which was the king and bishop building a church on the ruins of pagan temples. This bond between bishop and king thus became the bond between soul and body of a people. The bishop publicly celebrated the cultus, from which came the soul of the people in the principle of moral order. The king, representing the body of the people, received direction from the cultus and then ordered the government, economy and families accordingly.
In the public order, the rights of God must be maintained and the king, coin and kitchen must be submitted to the King of Kings. In the private order, the rights of man must be maintained and no one should be forced to be baptized. The danger is that the rights of man could supplant the rights of God in the public order.
But while this conversion of faith was an event of Baptism, the conversion of morals would take centuries. For just as before, the powerful would not accept this new rule of logos without a fight. The enemies of the Church were ever at work seeking to undermine Christ’s Kingdom ruled from the hearts of men. At this same time the Persian “king of kings,” Shapur II (309-379) was provoked to “extreme cruelty,” embarking on a campaign against every soul who said Christ was King of Kings.[24] Wigram suggests this was urged on by the enemies of Christ among the Jews, heretics and pagans, eventually killing, says Sozomen, 16,000 Christians and others “beyond enumeration.”[25] Between 337-361 he would also make war on Rome from without. The Church’s enemies sought to destroy the Kingdom in the Persian Empire with the old methods, but in the Roman Empire some new tactic had to be found. For “the devil, seeing the temples of the demons deserted, and the human race running to the name of the liberating Mediator…moved the heretics under the Christian name to resist the Christian doctrine.”[26] This would necessitate a union between the moderate and strict parties to face a new danger.
[1] Eusebius, Church History,bk. IX, ch. 8.
[2] Socrates Scholasticus, Church History, bk. I, ch. 2; Sozomen, Church History, bk. II, ch. 3.
[3] Sulpitius Severus, Sacred History, bk. II, ch. 33.
[4] Dietrich von Hildebrand, Aesthetics, vol. II, 76.
[5] Richard Abdy “Tetrachy and the House of Constantine,” William E. Metcalf ed. The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Coinage (Oxford University Press: 2012) 595.
[6] Socrates, Church History,bk. I, ch. 19; Fr. John Meyendorff, Imperial Unity and Christian Division (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011), 118.
[7] “Sacred Sites of Ethiopia and the Arc of the Covenant,” World Pilgrimage Guide https://sacredsites.com/africa/ethiopia/sacred_sites_ethiopia.html. Accessed February 3, 2021.
[8] Socrates, op. cit., bk. I, ch. 20.
[9] St. Patrick, Confessions, 1, trans. McCarthy <https://www.confessio.ie/etexts/confessio_english#>, accessed March 23, 2021.
[10] Ibid., 17.
[11] Ibid., 23, 37.
[12] Ibid., 41.
[13] Ibid., Letter to the Soldier of Coroticus, 2, trans. McCarthy <https://www.confessio.ie/etexts/epistola_english#01>, accessed March 23, 2021.
[14] Muirchú, Life of Holy Patrick the Confessor, I.10, trans. L. Bieler <https://www.confessio.ie/more/muirchu_english#>, accessed March 23, 2021.
[15] Ibid., I.19, 1.
[16] Ibid., I.15, 6.
[17] Ibid., 1.17 5-6.
[18] Ibid., I.20.
[19] Ibid., I.20.
[20] Ibid., I. 21, 22.
[21] E. D’Alton, “Ireland,” The Catholic Encyclopedia (1910) <www.newadvent.org/cathen/08098b.htm>, accessed September 28, 2021.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Summa, II-II q85 a1.
[24] Sozomen, Church History, bk. II, ch. 14.
[25] Ibid.; W. A. Wigram, An Introduction to the History of the Assyrian Church (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1911), 62.
[26] Augustine, City of God, bk. XVIII, ch 51.