Why I read the Summa Simplified
Katherine Watt
Bailiwick News
Response to some reader questions about why I read aloud from the Summa Simplified book:
💬 As a non-Catholic, how does this all pertain to me? Why should I look at it?
As with all of what I publish at Bailiwick, no reader is obligated to read it, look at it or listen to it. I offer it for anyone for whom it is of interest.
Catholic teaching pertains to you because you have a soul, the eternal salvation of which is of interest to me, and should be of interest to you.
💬 Why is this writing of St. Thomas so important? As with much of the canon, it is simply too long to wade into hoping to be able to eventually figure out whether it holds anything for me. A distillation or summary would be helpful, if you have a link.
The things I'm reading aren't St. Thomas himself. The Summa Simplified is an abridged or condensed version, written in English by two priests and published in 1952, of the full Summa Theologica written in Latin by St. Thomas Aquinas between 1265 and 1274.
The reason I'm reading that out loud, and not something else, is because I came across it in the collection of my late father's Catholic books when I was struggling last November with the magnitude of the deception I was reading about in the biological product law. When I began reading the English translation of St. Thomas's main work, I found opportunities for intellectual rest because it's words about what is true, and thus the opposite of, or balm for, the reams of painful false words (better known as lies) that I've been immersed in for most of the last four years.