The Angelic Warfare devotion, also called the Cord of St. Thomas, is named after a supernatural event in the life of St. Thomas. When St. Thomas entered the Dominican Order, his family — especially his mother, the Countess Theodora — was very opposed to his choice of vocation. They were not opposed to his becoming a priest, but they were of noble blood, related to the royal houses of France, Sicily, Aragon and Germany. They wanted him to become a churchman who was powerful in the political sense.
Thomas, however, could not be dissuaded from his desire to join the friars of St. Dominic, a relatively new and untried group who were poor and possessed little political influence.
St. Thomas asked his superiors to get him away from his family’s efforts to hinder his vocation. They decided to send him from Naples, near
his birthplace in Aquino, to Paris for his formation.
Frustrated in her desire to keep him from entering the Dominicans, Thomas’ mother ordered her two sons, Landolf and Reginald, both knights, to bring her son home in order to dissuade him. They captured him on the way to Paris, and Thomas became the virtual prisoner of his family. His brothers tried for several years to change his mind.
When argument would not prevail, these hardened soldiers decided on a direct course of action. They sent a woman of ill repute into
St. Thomas’ room to tempt him away from his vocation by causing him to break his vow of chastity. Thomas immediately took a burning stick from the fire, and, brandishing it, drove out the woman. Then he fell to his knees, praying for deliverance from these trials.
The hagiographers tell us that St. Thomas at that moment had a mystical experience in which angels girded him with a cord of chastity, and that he was never again tempted against chastity. One author states the spiritual and moral meaning of this when he has the angel say, “On God’s behalf we gird thee with the girdle of chastity, a girdle that no attack will ever destroy.” This girding with the cord is the source of the Angelic Warfare devotion.
After this, Thomas’ mother detained him for at least a year, sending other members of the family to convince him. His sisters, the chosen debaters, found Thomas so persuasive in answering them that they, too, finally embraced the religious life.
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