A Life, for his feast on the twenty-second day of September — III classis, with commemoration of Ss. Maurice and Companions, Martyrs
Dispersit, dedit pauperibus: iustitia eius manet in sæculum sæculi. “He hath distributed, he hath given to the poor: his justice remaineth for ever and ever.” — Antiphon of his Office, from Psalm 111:9
I. The mill at Fuenllana
He was born in the year 1488 at Fuenllana, in the diocese of Toledo, and was brought up a few miles off at Villanueva de los Infantes, from which town he took the name the Church has given him. (The older Augustinian accounts sometimes give 1486; the Roman Breviary and the standard lives settle on 1488, which agrees with the age of sixty-seven recorded at his death.) He was baptized Tomás García y Martínez, the son of Alonso Tomás García and Lucía Martínez Castellanos. His father was a miller — a man of some substance in a small place, but a miller.
The house was not merely pious but organized for almsgiving. Every Friday his father gave away in alms the whole of the meal he had earned at the mill, over and above his daily dole of bread; on the great feasts he added wood, wine, and money, and he lent seed and money to farmers who had neither. When he died, Lucía continued the practice and added her own: clothing and dowries for poor girls of the neighbourhood.
This matters more than the picturesque stories usually told of saints’ childhoods, because it explains them. The boy who repeatedly came home without his clothes, having put them on some child who had none, was not inventing a private heroism. He was imitating his father. Sanctity, in this case, was first of all an inheritance of household habit, and it is worth noticing how often that is the case. A man does not usually give away two-thirds of an archbishop’s revenue at fifty-seven unless somebody taught him, at seven, that the flour was not entirely his.
II. Alcalá: the chair renounced
At sixteen he entered the new University of Alcalá de Henares, the foundation of Cardinal Cisneros and the intellectual engine of the Spanish reform. He proceeded master of arts and licentiate in theology, and in 1514 he held the chair of arts, logic, and philosophy. Among those who sat under him were Fernando de Encinas and Domingo de Soto — the latter to become one of the great theologians of the century and an architect of the doctrinal work of Trent. Thomas was, by any reckoning, a first-rate academic in the first rank of Spanish universities.
The Augustinian tradition adds a detail that the hagiographers of a graver school tend to leave out: he was absent-minded, and his memory was poor. It is a small thing, and it is worth keeping, because it stands against the temptation to imagine sanctity as a kind of general excellence. He was a distinguished professor who mislaid things.
Then Salamanca offered him the chair of natural philosophy — a further advance, the sort of summons a man of thirty-five accepts without deliberating. He declined it. He went to Salamanca, but not to the university.
III. The habit at Salamanca
In 1516 he entered the Order of the Hermits of St. Augustine at Salamanca; he made his vows in 1517; he was ordained in 1518 and said his first Mass at Christmas of that year. Before entering he had settled his patrimony, keeping back what his mother required and giving the remainder to the poor and the sick.
In the convent he was set to teach scholastic theology, his superiors having noticed both his life and his books — he read chiefly the Sentences of Peter Lombard and St. Thomas Aquinas, and the Angelic Doctor’s mark is on his theology ever after. To teaching was soon added preaching, and here the thing that made him famous appeared. He preached at Salamanca, at Valencia, at Valladolid where the imperial court sat. His Sermon on the Love of God is reckoned among the finest pieces of sacred oratory Spain produced in that century, and the Emperor Charles V, having heard him, is said to have exclaimed that this man could move the very stones.
Charles made him court preacher and a councillor of state. It was an appointment that might have swallowed him; it did not. He rarely came to court for ceremony, though he corresponded with the Emperor at length and Charles set great store by his judgment. Near the end of his life, at Valencia, he had the whole of the Emperor’s correspondence with him destroyed — an act of deliberate self-effacement, the burning of the evidence that he had mattered to the master of Europe. His own letters to Charles survive at Simancas only because they were in the Emperor’s keeping, not his.
Within his own Order he was prior in several houses and twice prior provincial: of Andalusia and Castile in 1527, and of Castile in 1533. It was from this second provincialate that, in 1533, he sent the first band of Augustinian friars across the Atlantic to found the houses of the Order in Mexico. A man commonly remembered for feeding the poor at his own door had, by then, already reached across an ocean.
IV. The see that no bishop had lived in
Charles V offered him the archbishopric of Granada. He refused it.
Then, on the fifth of August, 1544, came the nomination to Valencia, confirmed by Paul III. He refused that too, and went on refusing, until his religious superior commanded him under obedience to accept — which is the only argument that has ever worked on such men. He was consecrated in his Order’s church at Valladolid by Cardinal Juan Tavera, Archbishop of Toledo, and entered his see on the first of January, 1545, the thirty-second bishop and eighth archbishop of Valencia.
The see had not had a resident bishop in something close to a hundred years. That sentence should be allowed to land before the charity is admired. Valencia was one of the wealthiest churches in Spain, and for a century its revenues had gone to absentee prelates while its clergy went uncorrected, its hospitals unvisited, and its poor unrelieved. The scandal Trent was then sitting to address had a local address, and Thomas was sent to it.
He arrived in the habit he had received in the novitiate, which he still wore and still mended himself. The cathedral chapter, according to custom, presented the new archbishop with a large sum — the accounts give four thousand ducats — to furnish his residence. He sent it to the general hospital, which was then in ruins, remarking that Our Lord would be better served by the money being spent on the poor, and asking what a poor friar wanted with furniture. Led to his throne in the cathedral, he pushed the silk cushions aside and kissed the pavement. His first visitation in the city was not to the noble houses but to the prison.
The canons and his own household were embarrassed by him for eleven years and never moved him an inch.
V. Pater Pauperum
Two-thirds of the revenues of the see went annually in alms. The gate of the archiepiscopal palace stood open, and every poor person who came was fed — four or five hundred a day, with a meal, drink, and money.
He did not, however, run a soup kitchen and call it a diocese. The organization of his charity is the part worth studying:
He appointed almoners in every district of the city with standing orders to seek out the respectable poor — those who had fallen and could not bring themselves to beg. These were relieved privately, with money, food, and clothing, so that the gift cost them nothing in shame.
To workmen, farmers, and tradesmen fallen behind he did not give a meal but restocked them and bought them tools, so that the relief ended in a livelihood and not in dependence.
He established a casa cuna near his palace for foundlings and the children of the destitute, and paid his servants for every abandoned infant they brought him.
During the eleven years of his episcopate, it was said, no poor girl in Valencia was married without a dowry from the archbishop.
And he had Mass said at early hours for the working people, which is charity of a kind that costs money only in candles and is neglected in every century.
It was objected to him — it is always objected — that he was being cheated, that among his four hundred were idlers and frauds. His answer has come down in one sentence: if there are men who refuse to work, that is a matter for the governor and the police; his own duty is to assist and relieve those who come to his door.
This is not sentimentality, and it is important to see why. St. Thomas Aquinas teaches that almsgiving is an act of charity performed through the medium of mercy, and that to give of one’s superfluities to a man in need is not a counsel but a precept (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 32, aa. 1, 5). The archbishop’s obligation was defined by the need in front of him, not by the merit of the needy; the sorting of the deserving from the undeserving is a work of civil justice, and belongs to the magistrate. He had read his Thomas and he knew whose office was whose. And he stood in the line of his own father in religion: St. Augustine liked to tell his people that the poor are the porters who carry our goods ahead of us to the country we are travelling to (cf. Sermo 60, on almsgiving). Thomas believed it literally enough to send nearly everything on ahead.
VI. The reform of a diocese
Charity did not exhaust him, and it must not be allowed to exhaust his reputation. He was a legislator of the first order, and what he did at Valencia is a miniature of what Trent was simultaneously prescribing for the whole Church.
He opened a visitation of the diocese within weeks of his arrival, and forbade his visitators to accept any gift whatsoever from any person — the small rule that makes the large reform possible.
He held a diocesan synod, the first at Valencia in many years, and legislated against the standing abuses: the blood feuds, the irregular unions, the concubinage of clerics, and the tangle of privileges and exemptions by which men escaped correction.
He abolished the subterranean prisons.
He rebuilt the general hospital, which had lately burned.
He founded two colleges: one for the training of young clerics — a seminary in effect, and before Trent required one — and one for poor students, the Colegio de la Presentación, so that poverty should not be a bar to learning.
And he laboured over the nuevos cristianos, the Morisco converts of the kingdom of Valencia, whose Christianity was in large part an outward form. His judgment was that the remedy was instruction: catechesis, preaching, men who could teach them. A diocese cannot be made Christian by registration.
He was invited to the Council of Trent and did not go. The reasons given are various — his health, the unwillingness of his people to lose him, the Emperor’s need of him at home — and the honest position is that we do not certainly know which weighed most. It remains one of the quiet ironies of the century that one of the model bishops of the Catholic Reform reformed his diocese without attending the council that told the others to do it.
VII. Gentleness
He was reproached for being slow and mild in the correction of sinners, at a period when severity was in fashion and cheap. He answered his critics by asking whether St. Augustine and St. John Chrysostom had employed anathemas and excommunications to put down the drunkenness and blasphemy of the people in their care.
One story is told which, if it is true, explains the rest of him. A priest of the diocese had ignored his admonitions repeatedly. The archbishop took him into a room alone, bared his own shoulders, knelt before the crucifix, and said that it was his own sins which were the reason this man had not amended, and that it was just that he should bear the penalty of his own fault; and he scourged himself in the priest’s presence.
A bishop who governs that way will be imposed upon, and he was. It is the risk proper to the office, and the opposite risk — a diocese governed by a man who cannot be imposed upon — has ruined more souls.
His table was plain, his dress cheap and mended by his own hands, his spare hours given to prayer and study. The processes of his canonization gathered the customary testimonies of healings, of food multiplied, and of ecstasies at the altar; he had, besides, a tender devotion to the Blessed Virgin, whose heart he compared to the bush that burned and was not consumed. His sermons — some twenty editions of them exist — are full of what the old manuals called the practical norms of mystical theology, which is to say that he preached the interior life to ordinary people and expected them to live it.
VIII. The bed
In August of 1555 he was taken with angina pectoris, and knew what it was.
He ordered that all the money in the house be distributed at once to the poor, and his goods given away; and he gave away the bed he was lying on. The accounts differ in the detail, and the difference is instructive rather than troublesome: some say he sent it to the gaol for the use of the prisoners and borrowed it back for the few days it would still be needed; others that he gave it to a poor man who let him keep it to die on; others that he asked simply to be laid on the floor. What every account agrees upon is the fact: when the Archbishop of Valencia came to die, the bed under him was not his.
On the eighth of September, 1555 — the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary — Mass was said in his room. At its close he died, at the age of sixty-seven, saying the words of the psalm: In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum.
He was buried in his Order’s church of Our Lady of Help outside the walls, and afterwards translated into the cathedral of Valencia, where he rests.
IX. The Church’s judgment
Paul V beatified him on the seventh of October, 1618, and it was at that beatification that the titles were formally attached to him which the people of Valencia had used in his lifetime: el Limosnero, the Almsgiver; Pater Pauperum, Father of the Poor; and the Model of Bishops. Paul V set his feast on the eighteenth of September, which is why the older lives — Butler’s among them — keep him on that day.
Alexander VII canonized him on the first of November, 1658.
His feast is now kept on the twenty-second of September, in the traditional Roman calendar as a feast of the third class, with a commemoration of St. Maurice and the martyrs of the Theban Legion; the reformed calendar keeps the same day. The Mass is Statuit ei Dominus from the Common of a Confessor Bishop, with a proper Collect of great beauty; the Gospel is the parable of the talents (Matt. 25:14-23).
That Gospel is worth a moment. The servants are praised not for keeping what was given them but for putting it at risk in trade; the condemned servant is the one who buried it where it was safe. Thomas of Villanova received a great deal — birth, intellect, a chair at Alcalá, the ear of an emperor, the richest revenues in Spain — and traded every part of it away, and the Church reads over his tomb: Euge, serve bone et fidelis, quia super pauca fuisti fidelis, super multa te constituam. Well done, good and faithful servant.
X. What the life teaches
Three things, chiefly.
That charity is a work of the intellect as well as the heart. He is remembered as a man who fed five hundred at his door, and he was; but he also appointed district almoners to find the ashamed poor, bought tools rather than gave doles, founded a college so that a poor boy might study, and legislated a diocese into order. Sentiment gives a coin and goes home consoled. Charity, which is a theological virtue and therefore has an object and an end, asks what will actually relieve this man, and does that, and organizes it so it continues after the giver is dead. His institutions outlived him by centuries.
That detachment is proved on small things at the end. It is comparatively easy to renounce a chair at Salamanca at thirty-five, when there is a whole life left in which to be admired for it. It is another thing to be sixty-seven and dying and to send away the bed. The habit of stripping, learned at his father’s mill, held all the way down; and the test of whether a man’s poverty is real is usually not what he gave up when it was dramatic but what he is still holding when he is too tired to make a gesture.
That the ordinary way to reform the Church is to reform the diocese you were given. He was not at Trent. He did not write the decrees. He took one neglected see that had been farmed for a century by absentees, lived in it, visited it, held its synod, fixed its hospital, taught its clergy, fed its poor, and died in it — and the Church, canonizing him, called him the Model of Bishops. There is a version of zeal that is always concerned with the council, the papacy, the age, the crisis, and is never concerned with the parish. It is not his.
Practice
Examine. What are you holding back for the end — the reserve, the security, the thing you have decided you will give away later, when it is safe? Name it. Detachment is not about the sum; it is about the clause except this.
Do. One act of charity this week that costs you something and is organized rather than impulsive: not the coin handed over at the light, but the person you know to be in need, relieved in a way that leaves them their dignity and actually repairs the situation. Buy the tools, not the meal, if the tools are what is wanted. And do it so that no one knows but the one relieved.
Pray. The Collect of the day:
Deus, qui beatum Thomam Pontificem insignis in pauperes misericordiæ virtute decorasti: quæsumus; ut eius intercessione, in omnes qui te deprecantur, divitias misericordiæ tuæ benignus effundas.
“O God, who didst adorn blessed Thomas, Thy Bishop, with the virtue of a signal mercy toward the poor: grant, we beseech Thee, that by his intercession Thou mayest graciously pour out the riches of Thy mercy upon all who call upon Thee.”
Note what the Collect asks. It does not ask that we be made generous. It asks that God pour out upon us the mercy of which this man’s almsgiving was a small imitation. That is the right order: his charity was an echo, not an original.
Devote. The Glorious Mysteries, or — for this feast, on which the Church remembers a man who died on Our Lady’s birthday with the psalm on his lips — the Second Sorrowful Mystery, and the In manus tuas said slowly at night before sleep.
If you wish to go deeper: the Lives of the Saints path continues with the bishops of the Catholic Reform — Charles Borromeo, Francis de Sales, Pius V, John of Ávila — men who took a diocese and did with it what Thomas did with Valencia. The Theology and Doctrine path treats almsgiving in the Thomistic order: why it is an act of charity through mercy, when it binds under precept and not merely counsel, and what is owed from superfluity (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 32). The Church History path takes up the Spanish reform of Cisneros and the Council of Trent, which is the world this life belongs to.
Sancte Thoma a Villanova, pater pauperum, ora pro nobis.