# Leo XIII founds the Leonine Commission to edit Aquinas’s works critically

Date: 1880

## The fact

After Aeterni Patris, Leo XIII in 1880 set the Leonine Commission to produce a critical Opera omnia. Better texts are an access gain even when the encyclical also froze curricula.

## Context

Critical editions can undermine pious legends. That is a feature. The Commission is still at work in later decades.

[Thomas Aquinas](/people/thomas-aquinas) is not the sole author of every later object, law, or museum label that uses the name. Shared work with courts, excavators, printers, spouses, officials, and later states does not erase a documented role, and it does not make an ancient person the signer of a twentieth-century statute.

## Evidence and sources

Official edition, Holy See, or archive page and an independent publisher independently describe this instrument.

Official or archival record: Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris (4 August 1879) (https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_04081879_aeterni-patris.html; Holy See / vatican.va).

## Significance

An 1880 critical-edition commission is a philological access path, not a syllabus oath.

## What is established and what is not

Established as a dated public record of this instrument.

What would change the picture: a contradictory original with a different date or name, or a measured series that can be argued, with lag and alternatives, as a consequence of this instrument rather than of later institutions.

The date is the date of this instrument, not a licence to back-date every later harm or benefit.
Later competitions, monuments, translations, UNESCO listings, and museums are not converted into extra lifetime acts. The attached driver is edu-[digital-learning-access](/drivers/edu-digital-learning-access). The welfare reading used in this dossier is improving. That reading is an impact-path choice, not a property stored on the Fact itself. Confidence is stated on the impact path. A later English edition is not a recovered autograph. If a number is not in the two records named above, it is not supplied here.

## People

- Thomas Aquinas: https://factrail.ai/people/thomas-aquinas

## Drivers

- Digital Learning Access: https://factrail.ai/drivers/edu-digital-learning-access

## Sources

- https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_04081879_aeterni-patris.html
- https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aquinas/

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/aq-leonine-commission