So a guy who trips, breaks his neck and dies while picking up his neighbor's newspaper is a martyr?
BTW. St. Thomas denied that life begins at conception. Do you therefore think early 1st trimester abortions are ok?
Do you know why Kolbe died?
St. Thomas did no such thing.
Some say that the vital functions observed in the embryo are not from its soul, but from the soul of the mother; or from the formative power of the semen. Both of these explanations are false; for vital functions such as feeling, nourishment, and growth cannot be from an extrinsic principle. Consequently it must be said that the soul is in the embryo; the nutritive soul from the beginning, then the sensitive, lastly the intellectual soul. (St. Thomas, Summa theologiae I q. 118 a. 2)
If Aquinas hadn't been wrong on a few things, it would be hard to believe he was human at all. I think his thought on conception is undoubtedly in error insofar as it tracks absolutely the Modernist who is consumed with Appearance over Substance.
Many Modernists champion Aquinas's poor thinking ... here's one example:
Pasnau has at least a partly political motive for including a full discussion of St. Thomas’s views on human embryology and their bearing on the issue of abortion in his treatment of Question 76. He notes that interest in the philosophy of Aquinas is often directly connected with sympathy for the Roman Catholic Church. Natural as this association may be, Pasnau regards it as unfortunate, especially in light of what he regards as the Church’s “noxious social agenda” (105) on, among other things, abortion. He wants to demonstrate that Aquinas actually “provides the resources to show something of what is wrong with the Church’s position.” (ibid.)
According to Pasnau, Aquinas thinks that the human brain “has sufficiently developed by around mid-gestation to support the operations of intellect.” At that point the human soul is “infused all at once by God.” (50) Before that time, the human embryo has an animal, but not a human soul, and, even before that, a vegetative soul. Aquinas’s position, Pasnau tells us, even though it rests on a dubious empirical claim about neurological development in the fetus, is admirably conservative. Thus, according to Pasnau, Aquinas pushes “the beginnings of human life as far back as he can while remaining consistent with his broader theory of the soul.”
I believe that if Aquinas had benefited from scientific exploration and the witness of those who -- like the late geneticist extraordinnaire Dr. Lejeune -- have a more objective view of human creation, he too would have seen the error of his ways.
Where it is so patently obvious that the new unique life is absolutely COMPLETE and requiring nothing more than the nutrition and shelter naturally extended (by anyone with human charity, much less one's own mother) to sustain that life, there's just no way Aquinas could have held to his medievalist view.
I think the medieval model's an extraordinarily beautiful one but there is a clerkish obstinance in trying to make all -- including the extreme circumstance -- "fit" somehow that it ended up as stifling in many ways and detrimental to genuine quest for knowledge of both God and creation as is the Modernist's arch belief he knows all and all that exists must necessarily be.