Homily for the Memorial of St. Dominic

Homily for the Memorial
of St. Dominic

Aug. 8, 2018

Collect
Our Lady of Lourdes, Bethesda, Md.

“May St. Dominic, who was an outstanding preacher of your truth, be a devoted intercessor on our behalf” (Collect).

When Ignatius Loyola was recuperating from the grievous wound he’d suffered in battle in 1521, the only books that could be found in the family castle were a life of Christ and a lives of the saints.  He was terribly disappointed there were no knightly romances such as he liked, but he set to reading what he had.  And he was entranced by the saints, especially the lives of St. Francis and St. Dominic.  These stories gradually led to his conversion from his scandalous ways, as he savored the joy that he found in the saints and aspired to imitate them.

Who was St. Dominic?  He was a Spanish priest born around 1170 who had the chance to pursue a career of prestige and comfort.  Instead, having seen, while traveling with his bishop, the need for the Gospel to be preached to the pagans on the borders of Christian countries in northern Europe and for the Church to address heresy rampant in southern France, he decided to devote his life to evangelization.  The Pope asked him to tackle the heretics of southern France who, in the description of Pope Benedict, “upheld a dualistic conception of reality, that is, with two equally powerful creator principles, Good and Evil.  This group consequently despised matter as coming from the principle of evil.  They even refused marriage and went to the point of denying the Incarnation of Christ and the sacraments, in which the Lord ‘touches’ us through matter, and the resurrection of bodies.”

Dominic preached with both the Sacred Scriptures and the example of his life, noted for his poverty and his practice of charity.  Before he died in 1221, he had gathered like-minded priests around him and formed the Order of Preachers—the Dominicans—who carry on the mission that he undertook.  In a radical move for the early 13th century, he insisted that his friars had to be men of learning, even going to those new institutions being raised in the cities, the universities.  They had to study the Scriptures and all things related to the culture of the times, the better to reach and evangelize the people of Western Europe as the period we call the Renaissance was beginning.  Like Dominic, they also had to live holy lives that exemplified what they preached.

Numerous orders and congregations of religious women have adopted the Rule that Dominic laid out for his friars.  The Dominican family has given us great saints like Thomas Aquinas, Catherine of Siena, Rose of Lima, and Martin de Porres, among many others.

St. Dominic receives the Rosary

from the Blessed Virgin

Dominic believed very much in devotion to the Virgin Mary, and the Rosary is generally attributed to him.  And he preached and practiced prayers of intercession addressed to Christ, Mary, and the saints for the benefit of the Church and its apostolic mission—which is why our Collect asked the Father to allow him to “be a devoted intercessor on our behalf.”

So, Dominic teaches us that our intercessory prayer is important, that we need to be devoted to the Virgin Mary, and that our Christian lives are a powerful preaching of the Gospel.