In 1930 he returned to Canada, where he taught for three years at Loyola College, Montreal. In 1933, Lonergan was sent for theological studies at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. He was ordained to the Catholic priesthood in 1936. After a year of Jesuit formation ("tertianship") in Amiens, France, Lonergan returned to the Gregorian University in 1937 to pursue doctoral studies in theology. Due to the Second World War, he was whisked out of Italy and back to Canada in May, 1940, just two days before the scheduled defence of his doctoral dissertation. He began teaching theology at College de l'Immaculee Conception, the Jesuit theology faculty in Montreal in 1940, as well as the Thomas More Institute in 1945–46. In the event, he would not formally defend his dissertation and receive his doctorate until a special board of examiners from the Immaculee Conception was convened in Montreal on December 23, 1946. Lonergan taught theology at Regis College (a theological school attached to the University of Toronto) from 1947 to 1953, and at the Gregorian University from 1953 to 1964. At the Gregorian, Lonergan taught Trinity and Christology in alternate years, and produced substantial textbooks on these topics. In 1964, he made another hasty return to North America, this time to be treated for lung cancer. He was appointed again to Regis College from 1965 to 1975, was Stillman Professor of Divinity at Harvard University in 1971–72, and distinguished visiting professor at Boston College from 1975 until 1983. He died at the Jesuit infirmary in Pickering, Ontario, on 26 November 1984. Influences Lonergan described the genesis of his thought up to the mid-1950s in an interview. Augustine and John Henry Newman were major influences upon his early thinking. J. A. Stewart's study of Plato's doctrine of ideas was also influential. In the epilogue to Insight, Lonergan mentions the important personal transformation wrought in him by a decade's apprenticeship to the thought of Thomas Aquinas. He produced two major exegetical studies of Thomas Aquinas: Grace and Freedom, and Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas. Works The University of Toronto Press has published Lonergan's work in a 25-volume series, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan. Grace and Freedom Lonergan's doctoral dissertation was an exploration of the theory of operative grace in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. His director, Charles Boyer, S.J., pointed him to a passage in the Summa theologiae and suggested that