Apostleship of PrayerSpirituality
Dominican Spirituality
"To contemplate and to give others the fruits of contemplation."
Dominic de Guzman was born at Calaruega in Old Castile in 1170. He was and the son of a nobleman and the younger of two brothers. He was educated privately at first but later was to spend ten years in the schools at Palencia, finally entering the Cathedral Chapter of Osma in 1195. Dominic accompanied his Bishop on a pilgrimage to Rome, where, at the bidding of Pope Innocent III, the two set off for Languedoc, a country that was at the centre of Catharism. Here Bishop Diego and Dominic spent the next ten years preaching to the Catharists. From the very beginning of this missionary work, they kept seriously the injunction of poverty but, above all else, they began, not only to listen seriously to the Catharists but also to treat them as human beings just as they were themselves. In this way they were different to other missionaries who relied on the power of the bishops and/or on the military force of the local barons.
Instead of having the Catharists stand as defendants in a court of law, Diego and Dominic debated with them, seeking for the truth according to the mandates of a disputation with pre - arranged rules one of which was that the one who could not show that his position was derived from Scripture was to be willing to concede defeat. Here at Montreal, in 1205, was sown the seed of the Dominican Order. With the death of Diego in 1206, Dominic was left as the sole dynamic minded person in command of a small community of like minded men. Dominic recognized that, if Waldensianism was to be conquered, it could only be by what they did themselves. Therefore, Dominic returned to a spirituality of the early Church with an emphasis on preaching and poverty.
Pope Honorius recognized the band as an Order in 1216 with the added, quite different, distinction of not having a permanent commitment to a specified isolated monastery in a rural setting but having their roots in the cities; the cloister of the Dominican monastery was to be as wide as the world is itself. They were to love poverty in the strict sense, it being the poverty of beggars; also from the very beginning the Order was to be a band of priests.
The official title of the new Order was to be the Order of Preachers: "Our order is known to have been founded from the beginning for the sake of preaching and the salvation of souls, and our efforts ought above all to be directly primarily and enthusiastically towards being able to be useful to the souls of our nieghbour." Dominic conceived that his friars would go out in pairs to all the world, preaching wherever they found the opportunity to do so: In fact the fifth General made it quite clear that, if a friar has the gift of preaching, that preaching took precedent over anything else that he may have to do, even prayer or administering the Sacraments.
Further, they were to devote themselves to the serious study of Scripture and other forms of knowledge. Substantially, their constitution actually says that the members could be excused from canonical prayer for the sake of study. Every house was to have its own resident lecturer in Theology . In contra - distinction to the Order of Francis, this Order did not reject the pursuit of knowledge and from their very first times of their foundation they have been involved in Universities. If a University did not have a Theology Faculty, the friars were to gather together while attending the University for the study of Theology; this was done for instance when the monks attended the University of Bologna in 1218. Over the years, the, the Universities became the recruiting grounds for the Dominican Order. Thus we find outstanding scholars as St. Albert the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas as highly intellectually skilled members of the Order.
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