“One day, through the Rosary and the Scapular, Our Lady will save the world.”
– St Dominic
St Dominic – Feast: 8th August
Priest
Today’s biography is written by Fr Michel Remery in Online With Saints.
Dominic came from Caleruega, Spain. After many years of study, he was ordained a priest. On a journey with his bishop through the south of France, he encountered the Albigensians or Cathars. They proclaimed a distorted form of Christianity, saying among other things, that matter like the body is of evil origin. Suicide by starvation, for example, was not considered problematic. Dominic saw the helplessness of the Church to respond, for the Cathar leaders were more heroic in the dedication to their misled convictions than the Catholic missionaries to the truth of the gospel. Together with some Cistercian monks he started to patiently explain the faith, while themselves living a convincing life as followers of Jesus in holiness, humility and simplicity. After ten years, he founded a house in Toulouse, which was the beginning of the Order of Preachers (OP) or Dominicans. Their ideal was to live very close to God through study and prayer, while preaching the word of God in a way that people could understand. Some Dominicans were severely misled themselves when they played an important role in the horrors of the inquisition. In spite of this dark period of the Order, today Dominicans try to live in the spirit of Saint Dominic while sharing the love of Jesus with everyone who wants to listen.
St Dominic and the Vision that Changed Everything
This reflection is written by Fr Richard Finn, OP author of our ebook Dominic and the Order of Preachers.
How do you communicate the vitality and dedication of a saint? How do you share his or her charism to inspire others?
In the digital age, a photograph or film may capture an animated expression, a characteristic pose or exchange. When medieval artists portrayed St Dominic, whose feast falls in most countries on 8th August, they frequently painted or sometimes carved, not a scene from his life but a vision which the saint received at Rome in perhaps 1215 or 1217.
St Dominic’s vision
He had been praying long into the night at St Peter’s, reflecting on the future of his work in the Languedoc, where this former canon of Osma had formed a small band of brothers who sought to teach the Catholic Faith to heretics who had rejected the Church and who denied the power of her sacraments.
Suddenly, Dominic saw in his mind’s eye Saints Peter and Paul approaching him.
St. Paul gave him a Gospel book, while St. Peter handed him a staff (the latter perhaps one-half rod of office, one-half pilgrim’s walking-stick). They told him that he had been chosen by God to preach the Gospel to the world.
The vision becomes life
Following the artists’ lead, we can see this vision as shaping St Dominic’s later life, and shaping the international Order of Preachers which he founded with papal support eight hundred years ago. St Dominic and his religious brothers were be apostolic preachers whose voluntary poverty and obedience recalled that of the first apostles and disciples.
As these men had been sent out to preach by Christ from Jerusalem without gold or silver, so now the friars were to be sent from the very centre of the Church far across the globe to preach His Good News, and to beg for the alms on which they would live.
Such ambition required personal dedication and adaptability; that’s something we still expect of any saint. It also took a quality we less often recognize these days, but which is of huge significance: the ability to work with others and hammer out together with them an institutional framework to advance a lasting common mission.
St Dominic spent much of the time from 1216 to his death in 1221 travelling the roads of Europe to support the friars in their new convents at Paris, Bologna, and in Spain, to discuss with them in General Chapters the constitutions and training that would facilitate their preaching, and to secure from the papal court the bulls or edicts which would authorise their mission and encourage others to assist it.
In addition, St Dominic formed and supported communities of cloistered nuns whose contemplative prayer would, in turn, sustain the friars’ apostolate in the wider world.
The mission lives on
Today, St Dominic’s friars can be found in over one hundred countries. They run university, hospital, and prison chaplaincies; they serve parishes and teach Philosophy and Theology in schools, colleges, and universities. You can find their preaching online at The Torch.
Their most recent General Chapter at Bologna drew to close on August 3rd when St Dominic’s successor, the Master of the Order, Fr Bruno Cardoré OP, signed the ‘acts’ which record the Chapter’s sovereign deliberations.
Together with Dominican nuns, apostolic sisters, and lay Dominicans, this ‘Dominican Family’ strives to make St Dominic’s vision a living reality.
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