To understand how important it is to support The Scholasticum — the only institute in all the world and all the Church dedicated to reviving the study of Scholastic Theology — take a moment to hear what Pope Sixtus V said of them, in his Decretal Letters of March 14, 1588, entitled, Triumphantis Hierusalem, § 10.:
For with the divine gift of Him, Who alone gives the spirit of knowledge and wisdom and understanding, and Who furnishes His Church throughout the lifetimes of generations with new benefits, as is needed, and Who provides Her with new supports, there has been discovered by Our ancestors, most wise men, Scholastic Theology, which two Doctors glorious above all, the angelic Saint Thomas, and the seraphic Saint Bonaventure, most brilliant professors in this capacity, and first among those, who have been registered among the number of the Saints, with excellent genius, assiduous study, great labors and vigils have refined and decorated, and have passed on to those who would come after, optimally arranged and in many ways very clearly explained. And, indeed, such a salutary understanding and practice of this science, which spread abroad from the richest sources of divine letters, of the Roman Pontiffs, of holy Fathers and Councils, could certainly always bring the greatest assistance to the Church, either to understand and interpret, truly and sensibly, the Scriptures themselves, or to read through and explain the Fathers more securely and usefully, or to detect and refute the various errors and heresies. Truly in these last days, in which there has already arrived those dangerous times described by the Apostle, and the blasphemous, proud, (and) seductive men who advance to what is worse still, erring and sending others into error, this (kind of theology) is necessary to sensibly confirm the dogmas of the Catholic Faith and to confute heresies. And the state of affairs is such, that the judges are the very enemies themselves of the truth, by whom Scholastic Theology has become dreadful to the greatest degree, who scarcely understand, by that apt and inner-connected coherence of things and causes, in that order and arrangement, as by the training of soldiers in fighting, with those lucid definitions and distinctions, by that firmness of arguments and the sharpest disputations, light is distinguished from shadows, and the true from the false, and their mendacity, involuted with many deceptions and fallacies, like a vestment borne away, is brought to light and stripped bare. Therefore, inasmuch as these men undertake to fight and overturn this most fortified citadel of Scholastic Theology, so much more does it befit us to defend this unconquered bulwark of the Faith, both to conserve and keep safe the inheritance of Our fathers, and to embellish, as much as we can, the keenest defenders of the truth with merited honors.
Franciscanum 