Did Thomas Aquinas Eventually Believe in the Immaculate Conception?

It ought to be well-known that Rome’s dogma of the Immaculate Conception was denied by her leading medieval saint, Thomas Aquinas ( as outlined here ). This has been something of a thorn in the side of those contending that Mary was immaculately conceived. They have tried to explain Aquinas’ position away in various ways – such as by arguing that Aquinas didn’t believe that life begins at conception (which is true, but not particularly helpful to their case). Another theory sometimes set forth ( recently, for example, by Taylor Marshall ) is that Aquinas came to hold to the dogma of the immaculate conception late in life, even after writing the portion of the Summa Theologica that denies it.

Réginald Marie Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P. is (or, I suppose I should say, “was”) one of the leading Thomist theologians of the 20th century. In his Discourse II on Mary’s Immaculate Conception, published in “ The Mother of the Savior ” (1948), Garrigou-Lagrange wrote:

open-quote

In the final period of his career, when writing the Exposito super salutatione angelica—-which is certainly authentic [39]—–in 1272 or 1273, St. Thomas expressed himself thus: ‘For she [the Blessed Virgin] was most pure in the matter of fault (quantum ad culpam) and incurred neither Original nor mental nor venial sin.’

The problem is this:

The “neither original” in that quotation is an interpolation. Gibbings pointed that out long ago in his “ [Roman forgeries and falsifications](https://books.google.com/books?id=EdA8AAAAcAAJ\&pg=PA46\&hl=en#v\_onepage\_amp\_f\_false\_ ” but you can see for yourself if you get a modern critical text of the work.