Theological Foundations new file

204 Theological Foundations Father Matulaitis-Matulewicz also availed himself of the teachings of the Fathers of the Church with great enthusiasm. His conferences are peppered with Latin quotations from St. Augustine like: “Non colitur Deus nisi amando” 6 or the evil world should be overcome by “vi ver- borum et caritate.” 7 The two authors reached for the writings of the Fathers of the Church because they wanted to base their own teaching on a solid tradition. They drew from it abundantly as the treasury of the Church. In the teach- ing of the Fathers, they saw the best interpretation of revealed truths. Their spirituality has a strong theological foundation because it is based on the works of the most prominent theologians such as St. Bernard, St. Albert the Great and, especially, St. ThomasAquinas. It was on their teachings, among others, that Father Papczynski based his teaching on the Mother of God. Following St. Bernard, he called upon us to venerate the Blessed Mother in every possible way: “Let us vener- ate Mary with all the depth of our hearts, with all the warmth of our feel- ings and with all possible sacrifices because such is the will of the One who wanted us to receive everything through Mary.” 8 As he meditated upon the truth about Mary being the Mediatrix of all graces, he stated that we have everything through her and looked for an argument to sup- port this conviction in the writings of St. Albert the Great who, in turn, had claimed that “after God, she is the beginning of every grace in us.” 9 Just like St. Thomas Aquinas, he distinguished three stages of Mary’s sanctification: the moment of her Immaculate Conception, the moment when she gave birth to Jesus and the Assumption. 10 Father Papczynski simply adored St. Thomas Aquinas, and he gave an expression of his admiration for him in the famous speech which he delivered in St. Thomas’s honor at the Dominican church in Warsaw. In this speech, he quoted an extraordinary praise of the Angelic Doctor’s teaching written by a man who was, as Father Stanislaus put it, a man “as eloquent as he was wise, a pearl among the writers.” This is what it said: “The wisdom of St. Thomas is splendid, thorough and divine to such a degree that even great, penetrating and rich minds admire it and