SPIRITUALITY
Many mansions Fr Thomas Crean on The Angelic Warfare Confraternity
J
esus Christ has told us that in His Father’s house, there are many mansions. We often interpret these words as referring to the different degrees of glory enjoyed by the saints in heaven, but we may also see them as a description of the Church on earth. As St Thomas Aquinas pointed out when commenting on this verse, “God’s house is twofold, the Church militant and triumphant.” In fact, one of the things that impressed St Augustine when he was still looking into the Church from outside was how various were the paths pursued by Catholics within the unity of a common faith: “I saw a full Church”, he remarked, “and one went this way and another went that” (Confessions 8.1). One way in which this diversity manifests itself is by the existence of different confraternities and sodalities, when various of Christ’s faithful freely come together to pursue some common, spiritual end; for example, to foster devotion to the Sacred Heart or to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Each of these groups is like a chamber in the great house of the Church on earth. One such association that ought to be better known is the Confraternity of the Angelic Warfare. Founded by a Dominican priest in Belgium in the 1600s, its purpose is to promote the virtue of chastity among its members, under the patronage of St Thomas Aquinas, commonly known as ‘the angelic doctor’. But what exactly is it, and how did it begin? Its remote origins lie in a famous incident in St Thomas’s own early life. His family, who were of the nobility, were unhappy with their son’s choice of vocation. They had destined him for the wealthy abbey of Monte Cassino, but he elected instead to enter the Order of Friars Preachers, or Dominicans. In accordance with the vigorous manners of the time, some of his brothers therefore seized young Fra Tomasso when he was on a journey and led him
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Thomas Aquinus: “two salient features of Aquinas’s holiness were purity and humility”
back to the family castle, there to keep him prisoner until he should learn wisdom. When both persuasion and threats failed to change his mind, the brothers tried a baser expedient. All the early biographies of the saint describe how they introduced a beautiful young woman into the bedroom where their younger brother, then aged about
nineteen, was confined. As William of Tocco, who lived in the same priory as St Thomas for a while, explains: “They sent the loveliest girl they could find, adorned with the seductive arts of a courtesan, so she might lure him into her sin by her looks, caresses, and teasing gestures.” Whether she went there with some pretext to engage
SPRING 2025
