Sanctifica Eos in Veritate
St. Thomas Aquinas College
A Catholic College of Sacred and Human Sciences
Sanctifica Eos in Veritate
A Catholic College of Sacred and Human Sciences
De Fine Collegii
St. Thomas Aquinas College is a Catholic institution of higher learning established to grant teaching degrees through the study of the liberal arts, sacred sciences, and pedagogy.
The College was founded to impart a formation that is at once intellectual, spiritual, and apostolic. Its purpose is not merely to produce competent instructors, but to form persons of learning and virtue who will carry the light of Catholic truth into the classroom, the home, and the workplace.
By extension, the College has also been established to grant degrees to lay students who are not religious members of the Congregation, but who wish to attend a traditional Catholic college.
The College offers programs of study in the liberal arts and in the professional preparation of Catholic teachers, confers the Bachelor of Arts degree — a double major in the liberal arts and in education — with specializations in Elementary Education and Secondary Education. The education certificate programs are currently accredited through the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC), and cultivates the whole life of the college — academic, liturgical, and domestic — in the spirit of the traditional Catholic Faith. All programs of study are designed with the hierarchical ordering of the sciences in view: theology as the queen, philosophy as her handmaid, and the liberal arts as regulated and ordered to both.
De Spiritu Collegii
A college is known not only by its statutes and its programs but by its values. The following principles express the spirit which this College seeks to cultivate.
The first and governing disposition of this College. In an age when truth is steadily dimmed by error, the task of forming minds capable of reaching the truth of things has never been more urgent.
The motive of the foundation: to inculcate and preserve the traditional Roman Catholic Faith in the minds and hearts of its students, faithful to the perennial teaching of the Church.
The College exists first and foremost for the sanctification of its students. Academic excellence and apostolic effectiveness are fruits of holiness, not substitutes for it.
High standards of scholarship, rigorous formation in the liberal arts, honest assessment, and the courage to require much — expressions of respect for the truth the College is called to serve.
The students go forth as bearers of a sacred trust, with a zeal for souls that transforms the labors of study and teaching into acts of charity for the Church and the world.
Life at the College
De Ratione Instituendi
Education, rightly understood, is the systematic and deliberate formation of all the faculties of the human being — spiritual and physical — according to the model of supernatural perfection.
The intellect is formed through a thorough and ordered knowledge of the Catholic Faith and of natural truth in its light. The mind must see all things in their proper relations, ordered toward their first cause and last end.
All philosophy and theology are taught according to the method and doctrine of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor. Students are equipped not merely to know correct answers but to understand why those answers are true.
Genuine formation cannot be confined to the classroom. The pattern of daily life — the regular rhythm of prayer and labor, the discipline of the common rule, the beauty of the traditional liturgy — is itself a school of virtue. Pope Pius XI, in his encyclical on Catholic education, taught that the true Christian does not renounce the activities of this life but develops and perfects his natural faculties by coordinating them with the supernatural. This coordination of the natural and the supernatural is the guiding principle of every element of the College’s program: its courses, its schedule, its discipline.
De Spe et Proposito
St. Thomas Aquinas College aspires to become a center of traditional Catholic learning in which the integration of faith, reason, and virtue is not merely professed but lived.
As resources and circumstances permit, the College intends to expand its program of studies to embrace new disciplines — among them the sciences, business, and additional studies in the liberal arts — always under the governance of the principles set forth in these pages, and always in subordination to the primary purpose of the institution. The conferral of professional certificates alongside academic degrees is likewise contemplated, that the College may serve those who seek focused formation for particular apostolic or professional ends without undertaking a full degree program.
The College also looks, with hope and prudence, toward the extension of its apostolic mission to other nations. The measure of the College’s success will not be found in the size of its enrollment or the extent of its buildings, but in the holiness and learning of those it sends forth, assets to both Church and society.
Our Home
Set on a beautiful campus in the heart of Florida, the College provides a setting in which the regular rhythm of prayer, study, and community life can flourish. The architecture reflects the College’s commitment to beauty and sacred tradition.
The traditional liturgy stands at the center of daily life, nourishing the spiritual formation that animates all academic and apostolic work. The beauty of worship cultivates in students a love of the sacred.