Next Thursday I will be leaving Jersey after two years here as Assistant Priest, in order to resume my studies in Rome! It has been a wonderful two years, and on the feast of St Dominic, at a Mass of thanksgiving, I reflected on the ways we can learn from his Saintly example today.
The priests are idle and poorly educated, their preaching is dull and uninspired when they bother to preach at all, and they live lives of luxury while many are poor, starving, and suffering from disease. There is this strange new ideology going around telling people to hate their own bodies – telling them the body is the enemy of their “true” self, and our priests aren’t able to argue against it. The Church is too wealthy and corrupt, and it seems like everything is falling apart.
Before anyone begins to worry, this isn’t a quotation from one of the complaint letters from a Jersey Parishioner in 2024 currently sitting in Canon Dominic’s in-tray. In fact, it isn’t really a description of our own time at all (even if you might think you see a parallel). No, this is the world seen through the eyes of another Canon Dominic – a young Spanish priest called Dominic de Guzman, who was travelling through the south of France with his Bishop some eight hundred and twenty years’ ago.
In that part of France, the Languedoc, he came across a serious problem – in fact two serious problems.
The first was a new religious cult, called the Cathars (which means “pure ones”) although they often just called themselves “the Good Christians.” This cult was spreading like wildfire, and had only one real belief: that all material things, including and especially the human body, were the evil creations of an evil God. They believed that human beings were really genderless angels, trapped in this world by the evil God who made it, and that our bodies were the prison made for us. As a result of this belief, they discouraged people from marrying and having children, they encouraged a dangerous kind of fasting – encouraging its members to commit suicide by starvation, and they rejected all of the sacraments of the Church because those were bodily symbols. They also, theologically, rejected the incarnation – if Jesus Christ was sent by the good God to save us from the evil one, he could not take on the prison of the body. This was problem one.
Problem two was just as serious: the Church had no way to effectively deal with these Cathars. The priests who had been sent into the Languedoc to combat this cult were not doing their job very well. Either they lacked education, or they lacked credibility – the Cathars were winning people over by their claim to be living the kind of simple life Jesus himself lived, and their members were not going to be won over by wealthy monks riding around on horses surrounded by a retinue of servants. The Church, wealthy, corrupt, arrogant, and lazy as it had become, and lacking in proper education, was failing to stop the spread of a dangerous cult.
Dominic’s answer was to do something brand new. He would found a religious order, but unlike the other orders his would not be confined to a single monastery. In fact, they would own no property at all, they would be poor, and they would have no fixed home, travelling the highways and byways of France preaching the Gospel – following our Lord’s example
‘Foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’
This new order, the Order of Preachers, had a singular mission, a motto of a single word: Veritas. Truth. They would go out, and share the good news, inspiring others by their lives of poverty, and using their education and their deep spirituality to show that our faith was not only true, but that it was good and beautiful as well.
Dominic’s order spread. He sent them to the great centres of learning; to the ancient university of Bologna, to the universities of Oxford and Paris; in his lifetime his order spread as far north as Britain and as far east as Kiev. Carrying with them the weapons of their founder Saint Dominic:
It was said of him that he never spoke, except to speak to God or about God. His life was to pray and to contemplate the Lord, and the truth of the faith, and having prayed and contemplated and studied – to share what he had found with others.
It is said that in one of his periods of intense prayer, Our Lady appeared to him and handed him a gift for the whole Church: the Holy Rosary. The Rosary which is often called the bible for illiterates – allowing even those who cannot read the bible to contemplate and pray over the life of Jesus, by praying through the mysteries of his life in the company of his blessed mother – accompanying her through the joys of his birth and childhood, the sorrows of his passion and death, and the glory of the resurrection and new life in heaven.
Dominic was a saint, raised up by the Lord for a particular time and place, but whose life and work has left a deep impression on the Church today; and continues to teach us today – because his antidote to the problems of the Church in 1204 is the same antidote to the problems of the Church in 2024. That, like Dominic, we Christians must speak only to God, and about God. What does this mean?
It means spending time in prayer. Taking the time to be present with the Lord in silence – whether in the silence of a Church (in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament) or the silence of our own rooms when we wake and when we go to sleep, or in the silence of our own hearts turning to the Lord in the busyness of our day to day lives. It means spending time, contemplating the Lord – either by reading the bible, or praying the Rosary, to immerse ourselves in His life.
Then, it means taking time to speak to others about God. Sometimes this will be in those moments, those brief opportunities and moments of grace we are given when we are able to share our faith in all its truth and goodness and beauty in words – by talking to people about what we believe or by praying with them. But more often than not, I would argue it's 99% of the time, talking to others about God is less about what out of our mouths and more about what comes from our hearts. Loving others, genuinely and sincerely, being joyful in the life given to us by God, loving our faith and taking care to make our Christian faith beautiful and inspiring to others. The only Gospel most people will read, is the one written on our faces and in our actions – the Gospel will be good and true and beautiful to them only if it is good and true and beautiful to us.
This is where I pivot, from homily to valediction: which means it’s time to say goodbye. Don’t worry, my voice was made for singing Church music, not show tunes, so I won’t be singing ‘I will always love you’ from the bodyguard. But I do want to take a moment to acknowledge and thank all of you here, and everyone else who couldn’t make it for the extraordinary kindness and generosity you have shown to me over the last two years. So many of you have been so encouraging and accommodating as I prepared to be ordained as a priest last year and have had so many kind words to share. So many of you have been ready with advice, and invitations to your homes. It has been an honour to have been able to spend this little time I’ve had here sharing the Gospel with you, and an honour to have had the Gospel shared with me in the love and kindness you’ve shown since I arrived in September 2022.
I will always look back fondly on the time I’ve spent here, and maybe one day I might be lucky enough to be sent back. Until then, may God bless you all, and á la perchoine!
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