The Thomist Society of St Nicholas of Caen was begun in May, 1942, because some women students at the university in that town wanted to have a religious education on the same level as their intellectual training. They therefore decided to become disciples of St Thomas Aquinas, seeing that the Church names him as the surest master and guide.

The intention (and indeed the result) of the first lectures was to introduce the students to St Thomas’s thought and principal theses, and to stimulate them to do more than merely consult him, in fact to go right into his monumental Summa Theologica and live in contact with his spirit and teaching.

Seeing for themselves how capable St Thomas was of bringing them to the knowledge of God and giving them the basic principles of their own lives, they opened the Summa and studied it over a period of two years, 1943-45. This work was directed by Père Fauvergue, the Dominican Prior at Le Havre. They took the first eleven questions of the Prima Pars, studying them article by article—God, his existence, his nature—and they were filled with admiration for a teaching so wonderful in itself and so exactly suited to their needs.