The death of Master Thomas did not exhaust the polemics against his thought; on the contrary, it revived them. Only three years after his death, in 1277, the bishop of Paris, Stephen Tempier, having been entrusted by the Pope with a commission to gather information, went further and condemned a list of 219 theses suspected of heterodoxy exactly on the seventh of March , the anniversary of the day of Thomas's death. He opened a procedure to confront these teachings, and he did this despite the arrival of the very old Master, Albert of Cologne, in Paris to defend his old disciple.

Only in 1325 was the wrong done to Master Thomas remedied by the bishop of Paris who annulled the condemnation of his predecessor. Contemporary with that of Paris, was the condemnation of some theses of thomist inspiration made by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Dominican Edward Kilwardby and by his successor, John Pecham, a former adversary of Thomas at Paris. The studium at Oxford was oriented in the same direction. The situation then became more charged because of the hatred of the Franciscans vis-a-vis Thomas' doctrines which released a real struggle between the two mendicant Orders, once fraternally united in resisting the secular Masters of Paris.

The Dominican Order then awakened to the defense of its master with a series of theological works and with rules promulgated by General Chapters. The latter went so far as to pay Thomas tribute by venerating him liturgically on the 7th of March, and, further, by making the study of his doctrine obligatory.

After two canonization inquiries held at Naples and Fossanova from 1319 to 1321 both of whose long transcripts attested to Thomas's sanctity and to miracles due to his intercession, Pope John XXII finally proclaimed him a saint on the 18th of April 1323. The Dominican Pope Saint Pius V proclaimed him a Doctor of the Church on April 15, 1567, a title which up to then was carefully kept and reserved for the great theologians of the patristic period. Pope Leo XIII nominated him Patron of Catholic schools. His liturgical feast day was changed after the second Vatican Council to the 28th of January, the day his remains were translated to Toulouse.

In the years after his death western thinkers, even those within the Catholic Church, did not suddenly show a great enthusiasm for Thomas's methodological and doctrinal system which was, moreover, very demanding intellectually. There were numbers of theological schools that followed the methodological and doctrinal lines of this thought (thomism), but there were few who put his thought and his method up for discussion. Beginning only with the nineteenth century was there a revival of interest in the writings of Thomas, an interest which was confirmed by the magisterium of Pope Leo XIII both by his encyclical Aeterni patris of 1879 and also by his desire to provide a critical edition of the works of Thomas, appropriately called the Leonine edition. (This edition is till in process.) The magisterium of Pius XII also confirmed Thomas's teaching on his encyclical Humani generis of 1950. The second Vatican Council, following the same line, pointed to Thomas as the master of the speculative power of Catholic theology (Optatam totius, no. 16). Pope Paul VI did the same thing with great enthusiasm (see his Lumen Ecclesiae of 1974). Pope John Paul II, the present Pope, has made numerous interventions.

Last residence in Naples and his death (1272-1274) – Value of Thomas's thought and method