US Catholics are celebrating the arrival of one of the most venerated saint’s skull coming to America. Saint Thomas Aquinas’s skull has resided in Toulouse, France, but has been touring throughout Europe through the past year and has now made its way to the eastern United States, beginning with Washington, DC. The tour is celebrating major milestones of the Saint’s life. Last year marked the 700^th anniversary of Aquinas’s canonization, while this year marks the 750^th year since his death, and next year marks the 800^th year since his birth. Aquinas is a revered poet and philosopher whose Summa Theologica helped to combine faith and reason. Father Ambrose Little, OP, assistant director of the Thomistic Institute in Washington, D.C. and a Dominican friar like Aquinas was, noted the importance of the skull or relic to Catholics. “For many who are not familiar with Catholic devotion to relics, (the tour of Aquinas’ skull) might seem like a macabre event. But it is important to remember that from the earliest days of Christianity, the bodies of the saints have been symbols of faith, hope and love,” he told Fox News.

Congregants crowded St. Dominic Church in Washington, D.C, to see the relic and offer prayers. Over Thanksgiving weekend, the relic could be found in the Dominican House of Studies, where Father Thomas Petri offered a special votive Mass. Petri focused particularly on the importance of preserving the saint’s body. “We don’t believe the body is merely incidental to who we are. St. Thomas was clear. The human person is not just a soul and not just a body. The human person is a composite of soul and body. The human soul is such that it needs a body; it’s ordered to a body: not only to learn, to remember, to think and to imagine, but to move, to communicate, to be visible, so to speak, in the world,” he said. He later added, “St. Thomas’ soul was the form of his whole body in life, the form of this skull, in life. Jesus Christ has revealed that we will rise from the dead on the Last Day. The body, this body, this skull, is not unimportant. It’s most important.

Visitors who came to see the skull had their own reasons for wanting to venerate it.  Amy Sawka of Chantilly, Virginia, a homeschooling mother of five who is expecting her sixth child, spoke of Aquinas’s educational importance. “I came to ask St Thomas Aquinas for a little extra help to make the homeschool everything the children need,” she said. The skull has since moved out of the DC area and made its way to Charlottesville, VA and Providence, RI. Other stops along its tour include Cincinnati, OH, Columbus, OH, Louisville, KY, Springfield, KY, New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Its last stop in Baltimore will be December 18.