The Feast of St Dominic, founder of the Order of Preachers (Dominicans) offers an opportunity to rededicate ourselves to the joyful proclamation of the truth, to a spirit of poverty, and to a life of constant prayer.
In the early Middle Ages, the Church in Europe had three big problems;
First, the Church had become powerful and rich, which meant that many people became priests or Bishops for financial or political gain – they were prone to corruption and materialism.
Second, many clerics were poorly educated. So poorly educated that most of them were not allowed to preach, and even those who were often preached badly. As the philosophies of Aristotle and the classical world were rediscovered, they were ill equipped to answer them and the church fell behind the secular sciences.
Third, the devotional life of the Church was dulling and Church was becoming just another social institution.
Corruption, bad preaching, and the slow death of devotion; a world not so unfamiliar to us after all.
There was a void of good teaching and good examples, and like mould in a damp room, heresy thrived and the worst of these was the error of the Cathars. The Cathars professed a mixture of odd beliefs, but the greatest of them was that material things, including our own bodies, were evil. They taught a severe mortification of the flesh in order to be freed of their evil bodies; they told husbands and wives to refrain from sleeping together and imposed such strict dietary fasting that many of them starved needlessly.
Enter Dominic de Guzman, a Spaniard and the nephew of a Bishop, a well-educated priest. On his way to Rome he encounters the Cathars in southern France, he sees the local priests failing to deal with it and he realises something needs to be done. Dominic doesn’t rush into things, the first thing he does is he forms a community of religious sisters to pray for his mission. Only once he’s done that does he gather a community of brothers, of well educated priests, around him and start something entirely new; he calls it the Order of Friars Preachers – today we call them the Dominicans, after him.
In response to the wealth and the power of the Church, leading towards corruption, the Dominicans took radical vows of poverty – they would own nothing, not even the clothes on their backs, they would travel on foot from place to place, living in community and sharing everything between them. They mimicked the life of the Apostles; poverty and itinerancy (travelling around on foot) as a silent judgment and witness against a Church grown too worldly.
In response to the lack of education, the Dominicans based themselves in these new things called universities; they would study and teach alongside the brightest minds of Europe. The first Universities, at Bologna, Paris, Oxford, and Cologne, would all become great centres of the Dominican Order. And their study was not just secular, not what St Paul in the first reading calls the vain philosophies of the world, but centred on the higher sciences – on theology and sacred scripture. Nor were they just dry academics – they were not the Order of Professors, but the Order of Preachers – they went from the Universities to the Cities and preached the Gospel authentically and intelligently. The motto of the Dominican Order (one of them at least) is truth (veritas): a recognition that God is truth and that his followers are called to proclaim and defend that truth in the world.
And in response to the lack of devotion, the Dominicans became the great promoters of the Rosary. There is even a tradition which says the Blessed Virgin appeared to St Dominic and gave him the Rosary herself. They pioneered this way of praying over the life of Christ through the eyes of Mary, making prayer something easy and accessible we could do without needing even to read or to write. They offered us a way of praying both vocally and meditatively, and a powerful link to the intercession of the Blessed Mother of God.
It is this last point which is most important. The Church today faces the same challenges it did in the middle ages, and we have to realise what Dominic realised – without prayer everything else is doomed to fail.
Stories about Dominic’s life hone in on this point; we know very little about him (compared say to St Francis who founded the Franciscans within a year of Dominic’s founding of the Order of Preachers) except for two things. He is said to have spoken little, but that when he did speak he would always speak either to God in prayer or about God in preaching. And we know that he prayed long into the night.
St Dominic’s life teaches us two things, rooted in our readings today; Jesus calls us to follow him, even through adversity, even through having nowhere to lay our heads, even to leaving everything behind to follow him. St Dominic gives us an example of a generous yes to this calling. St Paul tells us not to focus on vain philosophy but on the higher truths; we find these higher truths in the life of prayer and study to which St Dominic devoted himself.
If we want to do our part to dig the Church out of the hole we find ourselves in today, we must embrace these lessons from St Dominic. But if we can do only one thing, it should be to pray.
Today we ask St Dominic to pray for us and for the whole Church, that we may share in the spirit of wisdom, devotion, and poverty with which He lived.
Preached on 8th August 2023, Published 19th August 2023 in Lieu of a Sunday Homily.
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