FOREWORD FERGUS KERR In the nearly forty years since the end of the Second Vatican Council, Pope John Paul II notes, the study of the work of Saint Thomas Aquinas has been neglected in many Catholic institutions (Fides et Ratio §61). In this encyclical, it is true, the Pope has Aquinas’ philosophy principally in mind, seeing this neglect in the context of a widespread lack of trust in reason in a good deal of modern philosophy. This distrust of reason, he observes, ‘with both surprise and sorrow’,
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