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Died. Jacques Maritain, 90, seminal figure of Roman Catholic thought and the 20th century's leading interpreter of Thomist philosophy; in Toulouse, France. Born a Protestant in Paris, Maritain converted to Catholicism at 23 and became the principal intellectual defender of 13th century Catholic Philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas. During the '30s, he emerged as a symbol of Christian humanism, the concept that the church, while holding to its theological precepts, should support political democracy and social reform. Regarded as radical thinking at the time, this caused some conservative Catholics to consider him a near-heretic. In 1939, he left his post at Paris' Institut Catholique and came to the U.S. as philosophy instructor at Princeton and Columbia. During World War II he played a prominent role in urging U.S. support for the Free French, and in 1945 he went to Italy as France's ambassador to the Vatican. Maritain produced more than 50 books, including True Humanism, Reflections on America and, in 1968, his most conservative, The Peasant of the Garonne, .written in seclusion near Toulouse, where he had lived for the past dozen years since the death of his wife. Among those influenced by Maritain's teachings were generations of philosophers, scholars and religious leaders. "I am a disciple of Maritain," Pope Paul has said. "I call him my teacher."