Bologna, Italy, Aug 8, 2019 / 10:03 am (CNA).- The first image to greet visitors to the basilica containing the tomb of St. Dominic in Bologna, Italy is a mosaic of the saint next to a dog carrying a flaming torch in its mouth.
This is not a depiction of a pyromaniacal game of fetch, but a reference to a dream which foretold the 13th-century preacher’s mission in the world — to be the bearer of Divine fire across Europe, illuminating the darkness of heresy and sin with truth and charity.
“When St. Dominic’s mother, Blessed Jane of Aza, was pregnant, she had a dream of a dog with a torch in its mouth, running around the world and setting everything on fire. She went to the monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos and asked a monk what it meant. He replied that the child in her womb would be a great preacher, who would set the world ablaze with the fire of his words,” Dominican Fr. Ezra Sullivan, lecturer at the Angelicum University in Rome, told CNA.
“In fact, the word ‘Dominican’ is a play on the Latin, Domini canes, which means ‘dogs of the Lord,” Fr. Thomas Petri, dean of the Dominican House of Studies in Washington DC, explained.
Throughout history St. Dominic has been depicted in paintings and statues standing beside a canine companion.
“One source recounts that the dog Blessed Jane saw in her vision was a greyhound. That seems right to me,” Petri said. “St. Dominic should be associated with breeds that are fast and useful for herding.”
“Imitating Christ himself, St. Dominic is a hound nipping at your heels to bring you to God,” he added.
“In the early thirteenth century, the Church was experiencing increasing devotion among the lay faithful that was unmatched by the clergy. At a time when bishops, priests, and monks were living extravagantly and rarely preaching, St. Dominic came to see that the Church needed priests who lived in poverty but who were also preachers of grace and truth, especially in the face of heretical cults that were leaching the faithful away from the Church of Jesus Christ,” Petri explained.
St. Dominic Guzman was born in Caleruega, Spain on Aug. 8, 1170. Throughout his life, he is said to have converted some 100,000 people through his preaching missions. He spread the devotion to the rosary, and played a key role in doctrinal debates combating the Albigensian heresy, a revival of Manichaeism, which had taken hold in southern France.
Dominic founded the Order of Preachers – the Dominicans – in France in 1216, adapting the Rule of St. Augustine in obedience to the pope, with an emphasis on study and community life in poverty. He died in Bologna, Italy after several weeks of illness on Aug. 6, 1221.
Benedict XVI said in Feb. 2010 that St. Dominic “reminds us that in the heart of the Church, a missionary fire must always burn.”
“Saint Dominic was given the grace not only to have a fervent zeal and love for Jesus Christ, especially Christ crucified, but also the wisdom to preach the Gospel with force and conviction,” Petri said.
Fr. Sullivan noted: “It was also said that ‘he always spoke either about God or to God,’ and therefore his words were like fiery darts that always hit their targets.”
St. Catherine of Siena, a third order Dominican, is frequently quoted as saying, “Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.”
However, Fr. Petri explained that a more accurate translation of what St. Catherine wrote in a letter in her dying days is, “If you are what you ought to be, you will set fire to all Italy, and not only there.”
She wrote this to her follower Stefano Maconi because she was “concerned that he was tepid in his devotion and pleaded with him to go to Rome to light the fire of Divine charity there amid the turmoil of schism and infidelity the city was experiencing,” Petri said.
St. Catherine of Siena spoke of cultivating the ‘Divine fire’ as “cultivating the charity of God in one’s soul,” he explained.
“The way we cultivate charity is by committing ourselves to be with Christ in prayer, in study, at work, in the home, and at every other moment in our day,” he said.
“Most especially, however, such communion with Christ is nourished and strengthened by receiving the Sacrament of Charity—the Holy Eucharist—in which the One who is Charity itself comes into us and lights our souls aflame in love for him and for our neighbor.”
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Since female “deacons” in the early Church were historically and now are decidedly not equivalent to male deacons (International Theological Commission in 2002, plus the sidelined Gerhard Cardinal Muller’s book: “The Priesthood and the Diaconate”, German 2000/English 2002), it seems the Pope Francis has four options.
He can either (1) invent a contradiction and throw the three-tiered sacrament of Holy Orders into complete chaos, or perhaps,(2) create a “deaconess” subcategory of deacon-like ministry that is no not-quite-an-ordination, or (3) simply reject any misguided advice (the term “inadmissible” comes to mind), or he can (3) remain silent.
Option Two seems to have been unwittingly pre-empted in recent years by the creation Lay Ecclesial Ministers. These ministers, as it was clarified in writing only at the last minute, serve by virtue of their sacramental Baptism and Confirmation, and not by any unspoken, grey-area-sort-of sacrament-ish Holy Orders.
How now to foster a category of service specifically for women and that does not look (speaking theologically) a hell of a lot like clericalism?
Other than Lay Ecclesial Ministers, another unmentioned and long-existing path for the laity is that of the “religious life”–very much in decline for reasons not mentioned. A new insignia and non-sacramental bucket list probably won’t reverse the post-Christian threats now eating away at the perennial Church.
Under the DOA Option One, would we now be tutored to look forward to a new set of amendments to the still-recent Catechism of 1994/97 (for which the same Cardinal Schonborn was the lead editor), that is, paragraphs 886, 896, 1256, 1538, 1554, 1570, 1569-74,1588, 1596?
And what are we to say of the implied marginalization of other ministries: Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion (sic Eucharistic Ministers), the ministry of welcoming, the ministry of teaching, the ministry of visitation, the ministry of (fill in the blank). Ministry inflation (like secular grade inflation) cannot be resolved by incrementally dissolving the Sacrament of Holy Orders, nor the Second Vatican Council’s “universal call to holiness.”
I wish someone could explain to me how this “conservative” mind , behind large chunks of the CCC, got to the place where he endorses nonsense after for so long being regarded as solidly reliable.
Probably for the same reason as Cardinal Oullet after he endorsed Amoris Laetitia. He either gave up after realizing that nobody would listen to his orthodox advise, or he is fearful of being put on a bus.
While Female Deacons are not explicitly prohibited, I think they should not be allowed given that in the minds of some it will open the door to women priests.
@Joe M – This Cardinal, for years, has vacillated between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. He has participated or allowed quite a lot of crazy or stupid things in his diocese. He is quite the contradiction and I have never been able to figure him out. He seems content to be blown about whichever way the wind blows.
Schönborn should be drug tested.