Parents are desperate bores about the cute things their children have said but the Aquinas family preserved a story about young Thomas of a rather different kind. They complained that he was always bothering people with the question: What is God? I expect the story is quite true and totally trivial; it only becomes interesting if we see it as a sort of premonition of his whole life, of what his life was to be like and of what his sanctity was like. The first interesting thing is that it was not a statement, an affirmation, but a question.

Some people are saints through their heroic work for the poor, some through their courage in dying for the faith, some through their indefatigable preaching of the gospel; sanctity takes all sorts of forms: the sanctity of St Thomas lay in asking questions.

We (and I mean especially his Dominican brethren) regularly get him wrong by thinking of him as someone who provides the answers. He does, I think, provide more and better answers than most, but what makes him central and vital to our tradition (which is quite an important one for the whole Church) is his conviction, which he hands down to us, that there is always a question to be asked to which an answer is either true or false.