In November 1486, Tomás García Martínez, better known as Tomás de Villanueva, was born in a town in what is now the province of Ciudad Real (Spain). He grew up in the town named Villanueva de los Infantes. However, it seems that his mother gave birth to him in a nearby municipality, Fuenllana, as his family had to move there due to an epidemic. At that time, Fuenllana and Villanueva de los Infantes formed part of the province of La Mancha, where an idle nobleman who would inspire Cervantes for his famous novel would live out his wild adventures. However, Tomás's family, also noble, took a different direction and Tomás was given a pious upbringing. It was a piety particularly Marian and he acquired an active, merciful character, intent on justice. It is said that, as a child, he sometimes gave away his clothes to the poorest children. When he was five years old, Ignatius of Loyola came into the world. He died a year after Tomás and six months after Emperor Charles abdicated the crown in favour of his son Philip. A year older than Tomás was Hernán Cortés, another Castilian nobleman.
A few weeks after Tomás's birth, Queen Isabella met Christopher Columbus for the first time in Alcalá de Henares. And it was precisely to the university founded in 1499 by Cardinal Cisneros - which had been the General Study House already established at the end of the 13th century - that Tomás went when he was fifteen or sixteen years old. He remained linked to the academic world for a long period, until he acquired the title of master and was in a position to obtain a professorship. However, in November 1516 - on his thirtieth birthday - he was in Salamanca taking the habit of the Order of St. Augustine, and professing his entrance a year later, only a few weeks after Luther had initiated his break with Rome through the 95 theses of Wittenberg. On 15 October 1515, Saint Teresa of Jesus was born in Avila; patron saint of writers, doctor of the Church and a great saint admired throughout the world as a source of inexhaustible mystical value.
In December 1518, Thomas of Villanova was ordained to the priesthood and began to carry out various tasks in the Order. After first refusing the appointment as archbishop of Granada while he was working as an Augustinian, he later moved to Valencia in 1544 to take charge of his episcopal see. The Valencian archbishopric had not had a bishop residing in its own territory for some time, a place, moreover, where there was a significant percentage of Moorish population -some converted, but in an irregular manner-, a low degree of moral dignity on part of the clergy and insufficient quality in the formation of those who received the priestly ministry. He therefore set about touring the diocese and establishing the Colegio Mayor de la Presentación (1550), which anticipated what the Council of Trent (1545-1563) would establish: seminaries. It was precisely a move that Archbishop Tomás de Villanueva used to insist on.
Good management to care for the most needy
His interest in maintaining the authority and demands of the clergy and of the Order was combined with his special emphasis on both formation and the care of the most needy. Although on several occasions this stance brought him into conflict with the civil powers - he excommunicated a governor - he was held in high esteem by kings, who attended his Masses to listen to his catechetical and well-crafted sermons - in which he drew richly from the Fathers of the Church, especially St. Augustine. At the same time that, with gentleness or severity as needed - avoiding humiliation and trying to inspire a rightful attitude - he corrected one or the other, applying to himself the harshness of disciplines and an austere life. His rigour was also directed to the management of the accounts of the diocese, which saw its income double under the government of Tomás de Villanueva.
Thanks to his solvency in management, Tomas de Villanueva was able to care for the poorest of the poor. On the one hand, he took in hundreds of orphans at the expense of the bishop's palace. On the other, he arranged for the diocesan headquarters to distribute daily meals which, according to Father Francisco Javier Campos y Fernández de Sevilla OSA, consisted of ‘meat or fish stew, a glass of wine and some money’. He also devoted his efforts to helping families in financial need, which included taking care of the services of apothecaries and doctors. This would be the most common image of the saint: giving alms and soberly wearing the habit of the Order. This is how he appears in numerous canvases from the same period or immediately after, such as those by Juan de Juanes or Zurbarán.
His fame as ‘Father of the Poor’ soon spread to many countries - especially in America - thanks to the work of the Augustinians in making this great friar known. Provinces, vicariates, universities, colleges and our parishes have engraved his name in time, inviting all the faithful to follow him who knew, as reflected in his commentary on the Song of Songs, how to enter into the intimacy of God and draw out the sweet nectar of his presence.
Thomas of Villanova was proclaimed Blessed in 1618 and canonised on 1 November 1688.
Solidarity as a response to the experience of God's love
Father Jozef Ržonca OSA, in an academic article he published during his doctoral studies at the Faculty of Theology of the University of Trnava (Slovakia), has compared the thought of Thomas of Villanova and that of Benedict XVI, and comments: ‘In the theology of charity of St. Thomas of Villanova we can identify a tripod: commutative justice, downward solidarity, and solidarity as a response to the experience of God's love’. In Tomas of Villanueva's own words, ‘man must be just towards his neighbour in the distribution of temporal resources. For, as Ambrose assures us in his book on Duties, nature has made everything common, and this world is nothing other than a kind of inheritance belonging to all men, even if positive law has established private property’. But Tomas of Villanueva's gaze was not worldly, because his charity was based on Christ: ‘when you have shared my hunger, my nakedness, my labours, my pains and my frailty, you are no longer a stranger to the wicked, you have learned to help the wretched’, says Thomas. That is why he said in one of his sermons: ‘We should be moved to compassion by the obligation we have, under pain of hell, to help those who are in dire need. The destitution of the poor is crying out against us, and their cry goes up to the presence of God. One has plenty of everything, and another is dying of hunger: will not God ask for an account of this?
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