Thomas of Villanova

Thomas of Villanova was born Tomás García y Martínez in 1488 in Fuenllana, Spain, into the household of a miller who made a practice of giving food to the poor. Growing up in Villanueva de los Infantes in Ciudad Real province, Thomas reportedly gave away his own clothing to beggars as a boy — a habit his family's relative comfort made all the more striking. He studied arts and theology at the University of Alcalá de Henares and became a professor there before, in 1516 at age twenty-eight, leaving his academic post to enter the Augustinian friars in Salamanca. He was ordained a priest in 1518. His gifts as a preacher spread his reputation quickly through Castile. He served as royal court preacher in Valladolid and rose to the office of Prior Provincial for Andalusia and then Castile. In 1533, he sent the first Augustinian missionaries to Mexico — one of the earliest organized Catholic missions to the New World. When offered the Archdiocese of Granada, he refused it; he accepted the See of Valencia in 1544 only after his Augustinian superior commanded him to do so under obedience, arriving at age fifty-six. Charles V, after hearing Thomas preach, exclaimed: 'This monsignor can move even the stones!' — a tribute that captured what Valencia's faithful experienced directly. Thomas composed a substantial body of sermons, including his celebrated Sermon on the Love of God, in which he argued that almsgiving exchanged a perishable coin for an eternal kingdom. As Archbishop of Valencia, Thomas found an archdiocese that had gone largely without effective pastoral oversight and set about reforming it from the ground up. He visited every parish in person, sold off the luxury furnishings of the episcopal palace, and distributed his archbishop's income to the poor so consistently that he earned the title 'Father of the Poor.' He founded the Presentation Seminary in 1550 to train a resident clergy and established a college for Moorish converts — institutional reforms that outlasted him. He died on September 8, 1555, after eleven years as archbishop, wearing the mended Augustinian habit he had worn since Salamanca. Thomas was beatified by Pope Paul V in 1618 and canonized by Pope Alexander VII on November 1, 1658. His feast day falls on September 22. Villanova University in Pennsylvania, along with numerous institutions across the Americas, bears his name — carrying forward the memory of an archbishop who believed the measure of a see was its care for the poor.