My brother and sisters were being taught by Dominican nuns when I was brought to be baptized, and those nuns asked my parents to name me Thomas, after Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican priest.
When I was eighteen, and our seminary course brought us to studying the Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, I was struck by his referring to God as pure Goodness, Beauty and Truth. From that I came to feel that whenever I came on goodness in people, beauty on Nature, or truth in science i was coming close to God.
With my plenty of free time, two years ago I was able to read through Dante's Divine Comedy. People often talk about the first third of the Comedy, the Inferno; but they might find more of interest in the third part, the Paradiso.
There Dante, arrived in heaven, met with Beatrice, his saintly muse. He told her that the wonderful things in heaven seemed vaguely familiar to him. Beatrice explained that familiarity in there words.
"All thing among themselves possess an order, and this order is the form that makes the universe like God."
On another matter, for the Catholic Church to recognize anyone as a saint, that person's supporters had to prove that the candidate for canonization had brought about three miracles. Each of those miracles would consist of a suspension of the laws of nature that bought about a cure.
Now, in John's Gospel we read how everything in nature was made in God's image. So, instead of the Church canonizing saints whose prayers brought about the suspension of Nature's laws, couldn't the Church canonize the scientists who revealed the God-like orderliness hidden in Nature's laws?
The Church could have a special kind of canonization for scientists like Copernicus who discovered God's wonderful plan for setting the heavenly bodies in synchronized motion, or for Watson and Crick who showed us how God cleverly enfolds 2500 genes in every one of your body's cells, thus enabling you to live a healthy life.
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