of St. Dominic
Aug. 8, 2018
CollectOur 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.
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