August 8 - St Dominic
Born in 1170 at Calaruega in Spain. He studied for the priesthood with
a priest-uncle at Palencia. Dominic was educated in arts and theology.
After his ordination he became a Canon of the Cathedral at Osma. Here the
bishop attempted to resurrect the common life of the early apostles as
outlined in Chapters five and six of The Acts of the Apostles. While journeying
with his bishop in France he encountered a virulent strand of the Albigensian
heresy at Languedoc. For the Cathari all matter was evil and hence denied
the Incarnation and the Sacraments. For similar reasons they abstained
from procreation and fasted heavily. 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. Dominic felt called to preach to these people and because
of the example of his own life he had some success.
Nevertheless he noticed that the preaching was not succeeding because the
ordinary people were greatly attracted to lives that Albigenses were living,
lives of the greatest ascetical practices. Dominic, with three Cistercians,
began to wander around the countryside, preaching to the simple people
there from his own simple life. This itinerant preaching according to the
Gospel ideal soon won over the ordinary people.
He fellow preachers and himself soon became a community and he founded
a religious house in Toulouse. Hence began the Dominican Order. 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. : "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 neighbour."
Dominic died in 1221 at Bologna.
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