What would you do if someone you knew claimed to be a Christian but also professed beliefs that were dangerous to his health, his relationships, and even his salvation?
Dominic de Guzman’s response was to establish a religious order.
Of course, founding a religious order was not his original goal. Saint Dominic de Guzman–who was born on August 8, 1170, and died on Aug 6, 1221–was just an Augustinian canon and Spanish priest traveling through France with his bishop when he accepted an invitation to stay at the home of a wealthy man. That night, after dinner, his host told Dominic that he was a follower of a common teaching at that time: the heresy of Albigensianism.1 Dominic spent the entire night patiently discussing the truths of the Catholic faith with the man, who finally agreed to come back to the Church.
Although Dominic had hoped to become a missionary in Russia, it wasn’t long before the pope ordered him to go to France instead and address the dangers caused by that heresy. Since other Catholic preachers had tried and failed to make headway against Albigensianism, Dominic first carefully analyzed its beliefs and the behavior of its leaders. The band of preachers that he trained to combat Albigensianism eventually became the Order of Preachers, commonly called Dominicans after him.
Since its founding in the thirteenth century, members of Dominic’s order have traveled all over the globe, armed with the truths of the faith and preaching the Gospel. The Dominican motto Contemplare et contemplata aliis tradere explains the reason that Dominic and his followers have been able to evangelize so effectively for centuries. That is, Dominicans are called to contemplate God first in prayer and study, and then hand on the fruits of that contemplation to others.
Dominic’s order has produced 282 saints and blesseds: 183 martyrs and 99 non-martyrs. While Dominicans are most often thought of as theologians—in the footsteps of Saint Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican priest who is certainly one of the greatest theologians in the history of the Church—Dominicans have become famous for other reasons.
Four of Dominic’s earliest disciples have been recognized for their holiness by the Church. For example, Dominic’s friend, Blessed Jordan of Saxony, became master general of the order after Dominic’s death. He was known to be a strict but kind leader, as well as a wise spiritual guide.
The male branch of the Dominicans, also called its first order, is primarily remembered for the theologian and philosopher Saint Thomas Aquinas. But Thomas wasn’t the only brilliant Dominican alive in the thirteenth century. He was educated by the learned professor Saint Albert the Great, and one of his classmates, Blessed Ambrose Sansedoni, was a noted scholar who evangelized throughout Hungary.
Of course, the Order of Preachers expects its members to preach, and to preach well. Two of the most famous examples are Saints Vincent Ferrer and Louis Bertrand, both of whom attracted huge crowds and made many converts and reverts to the faith.
However, you don’t have to become a famous theologian or preacher to fulfill your vocation as a Dominican. The world-class painter Fra Angelico was also a Dominican priest, although he was known in the order as Blessed Giovanni of Fiesole. Dominicans sometimes offer spiritual direction; Blessed Raymond delle Vigne of Capua served as a spiritual guide to many Catholics, most notably Saint Catherine of Siena. Many Dominicans have been elected pope, including Saint Pius V, Blessed Benedict XI, and Blessed Innocent V. Of course, one of the most famous Dominicans, Saint Martin de Porres of Peru, was a miracle worker and a religious brother, though not a priest.
Saint Dominic’s opponents repeatedly threatened him with physical violence, and many of his followers have experienced persecution as well. For example, Dominicans have died as martyrs in thirteenth century Poland (Blessed Zadok of Sandomierz); fourteenth century Italy (Blessed Peter Cambiani of Ruffia); fifteenth century Tunisia (Blessed Anthony Neyrot); seventeenth century Ireland (Blessed Peter Higgins); eighteenth century France (Blessed Jean-Georges Rhem); nineteenth century Vietnam (Saint Joseph Do Quang Hien); and twentieth century Poland (Blessed Michal Czartoryski).2
Dominican nuns, sometimes called members of the second order, have included a Hungarian princess (Saint Margaret of Hungary); a Portuguese princess (Blessed Joan of Portugal); and the widow of a marquis (Blessed Margaret of Savoy). Dominican religious sisters, on the other hand, combine contemplation with active service. Saint Marie Alphonsine Danil Ghattas was a Dominican sister who spent her life educating children in the Holy Land.
The famous wonderworker and Doctor of the Church, Saint Catherine of Siena, was a third order Dominican, not a nun. But she is certainly not the only female Dominican who developed a reputation as a mystic during her lifetime. Saint Catherine de’ Ricci and Blessed Margaret Ebner, both Dominican nuns, were known for their mystical gifts, as was third order Dominican Saint Rose of Lima.
Some third order Dominicans, such as Saint Zdislava Berka, spent their lives tending to the poor and sick. Saint Margaret of Castello, though blind and disabled, also became a third order Dominican and cared for the children of the poor while their parents worked.
But perhaps the most fitting example to conclude this overview of Dominican holiness is the life of Blessed Bartolo Longo. Bartolo was a college student in nineteenth-century Italy when his atheist, anti-Catholic professors led him out of the Church. He promptly fell into the clutches of a cult. In this cult, he offered his soul to the devil, and the devil accepted his offer. Thankfully, devout Catholics reached out to the possessed man and patiently led him back to the Church. Bartolo became a third order Dominican and spent his life helping ordinary people pray and understand their faith.
Every faithful Catholic alive today knows someone who has endangered his or her soul by accepting toxic ideas from our faithless culture. Thankfully, we don’t all have to establish a religious order to know how to respond. But we can thank Saint Dominic, and we can turn to him and his Dominican descendants for their wisdom as we try to lead others back to Jesus Christ and His Church.
(Editor’s note: This essay was posted originally on August 7, 2023.)
Endnotes:
1 This heresy is sometimes called Albigensianism because it was widespread in the Albi region of France beginning in the eleventh century. It is also sometimes called Catharism, and its teachings were rooted in an earlier heresy called Manichaeism. Although it had accumulated some Catholic trappings by the Middle Ages, Albigensianism was more of a dualistic religion than a Christian heresy; simply put, it considered the physical world to be evil, and the spiritual world to be good.
2 Although there are no canonized or beatified Dominican martyrs from the sixteenth century, the seventeenth century produced more than enough to compensate, particularly in Japan.
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“The Dominicans are so amazing. Just think, they have about half as many Saints as the Franciscans.”
I love that quote from the CWR Comments in the 13th C.
Seriously, great article. Keep writing about our Saints. We always need their example.
And the Franciscans have those saints spread across how many orders, again?
Oh dear. To begin, the Franciscans are one tree with many branches. The orderly Dominicans have 70 saints (counting Frassati;). The Franciscans have about twice that number of Third Order saints! The OFMs and Capuchins each have more saints than the Dominicans.
Seeing the towel in the ring, I’ll stop it there…
Your article reminded me of another crazy dream:
Our Lord asked St. Francis what he thought of this pontificate. The Saint smiled and said in all humility: For the sake of Your Justice Lord, consider a Pope Dominic.
This man, Saint Dominic is, in fact, the father of the democracy. His disciples (and later the Jesuits) joined the moral and the economy and politics, in Salamanca University (Spain).
In 1188 Spanish King called the first Courts in the world and 30 years later, with his Archbisop, founded the origin of that University. The fruit, after many clever people became at that Uni of Dominics and Jesuits, is the laic way of life today we catholics defended all around the world, that knolwedge: politics, economics, and moral (because conservatism, liberalism, socialism are heresies…).
Few remain.
Congratulations to D. Beutner for her article about this great and poor man.
St. Dominic’s follower Aquinas solves the Gospel conundrum of Martha and Mary: “the contemplative life is, absolutely speaking, more perfect than the active life, because the latter is taken up with bodily actions: yet that form of active life in which a man, by preaching and teaching, delivers to others the fruits of his contemplation, is more perfect than the life that stops at contemplation, because such a life is built on an abundance of contemplation, and consequently such was the life chosen by Christ.” (Summa III, Q. 40, A. 1, Ad 2)
Catholics legend credits St. Dominic as having received the Rosary from the Blessed Virgin Mary. He did further devotion to Mary and intercessory prayer to her; many holy people have claimed that a devotion to Mary such as praying the Rosary is probably a sign of predestined glory. Inasmuch as consistent Rosay prayer can lead one from verbal and then mental and meditative prayer, it is a good start which may easily lead to the contemplative way. Praise God and thank the BVM for St. Dominic. Thanks to Ms. Beutner for introducing him.
On this feast day of Saint Dominic, I like to share here again my favorite Dominican joke. The Order of Preachers (Dominicans) was founded to fight the heresy of Albigensianism. The Society of Jesus (Jesuits) was founded to fight the heresy of Protestantism. Can anyone find an Albigensian today? How about a Protestant? Happy Feast Day to the members of the Dominican family.
And yet, Albigensianism was a version of earlier Manichaean dualism where nature is a parasite on the free spirit. And, is very much alive (or dead?) in a culture of genocide, contraception, and routine abortion.
In “Mein Kampf” (1925) Hitler referred to Jews as “a parasite in the body of other peoples”; less than fifty years later, the year of Roe v. Wade (1973), a radical feminist group branded the unborn as “a parasite within the mother’s body” (an early edition of “Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book By and For Women”) and a violation of “free choice”.
We know not what we do.
Most of the old heresies persist in some form or another: Arianism, Gnosticism, Ebionism, etc. They might not preserve the exact details, but they definitely preserve the gist of the error. Ultimately, there are only one or two dozen errors that strongly pull to people. Pelagianism is more attractive to the human imagination than monophysitism.
Perhaps many who call themselves “Protestant “ will be saved, while many who call themselves “Catholic “ will be lost. We must remember that we are in sales, not management. Evangelism must always be done with the utmost humility. Man might be able to change a mind through reason or coercion, but only God can change a heart.
Wonderful summary of the Dominican patrimony of Saints.
St Dominic, pray for us.
“We see how the power of the Antichrist is expanding, and we can only pray that the Lord will give us strong shepherds who will defend his church in this hour of need from the power of evil.”
2015, BXVI’s letter to Catholic statesman Vladimir Palko might be interpreted as a call for new St Dominics…
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/benedict-xvi-it-is-the-time-of-antichrist/
At one point, I considered becoming a Dominican.
Heresy is an extremely important issue. The media is effectively complicit with its spread. An example is the oxymoronic phrase “abortion rights.” As an FYI this phrase appears to have come from fraudulent psychology, and started being spread in the late 1960s.
I would like to offer an historical fact that the Dominican’s lead the Inquisition against Jews and other apostates with devastating results. It’s important to present all of history when describing the contributions of Dominicans to Catholic sainthood.
I respectfully suggest that when you have some time to take a break from laboring in the field of your professional expertise, Social Work, that you familiarize yourself with the immense amount of excellent primary-source based historical scholarship on the so-called “Inquisition” (and anti-Catholic pseudo-historical fantasies about it that have been debunked by the primary leaders in the field) produced in recent decades. Everything most people were taught in recent generations has been upended, and rightfully so. You might begin with “Inquisition” by historian Prof. Edward Peters of the University of Pennsylvania (University of California Press), or the work of Prof. Henry Kamen (1998), considered the most important in the field today, who debunks most of the still-fashionable mythology of the subject.
I agree there have been myths created about the Inquisitions- both in Spain & Portugal- but there were also many tragic outcomes. Those didn’t end in Europe but followed exploration into the Americas.
Mrs. Cracker, with which of the above-mentioned books, or other works among the voluminous and nuanced scholarship on the subject which constitute this field of history, does your comment engage?
I honestly think I’ve commented over my limit today but some of those materials are books written by the Oxford historian Cecil Roth.
Also lectures by an historian at Touro University, Dr. Henry Abramson. I highly recommend him.
Discussions about the Inquisitions can be highly charged and partisan. I like to look at sources from different vantage points for some balance.
[There was no option to continue this conversation as a “reply” in the proper sequence, so I am inserting this here.] Mrs. Cracker, the works I mentioned are _the_ current standard in this historical field _today_, and are not antiquated (in multiple senses) ones from the 1930s, as Roth’s you mention, nor are they by minor non-specialists who may have happened to write on or discuss the topic recently. Without having read the works I cited, nobody today would be taken seriously in a scholarly discussion of this historical topic. “Different vantage points,” as you say, and the “balance” they might seem to promise can be quite tricky in history. I doubt you would agree that Holocaust deniers should be given a voice alongside peer-reviewed scholarship on the Nazi concentration camps, or that “aliens built the pyramids” theorists should be included on the university library shelf next to the best work by contemporary Egyptologists.
Given, also, as you noted, how “highly charged” this topic can become for many out there who are not accustomed to dispassionate analysis, and how serious it is given its potential for reflecting on the historical reputation of our Church, if you aren’t adequately versed in the topic, wouldn’t it perhaps be best to leave it by the wayside, here? [That’s a rhetorical question, to be clear].
Happy feast. The Dominicans are serving society with dedication and distinction. May their tribe increase.
Thank you for this beautiful reflection. Of course during this last week we have been basking in the grace of our brother, Bl. PierGiorgio soon to be canonized.
The Order of Preachers is both the friars and nuns and both make the same profession of obedience to the Master of the Order. The designation of first and second order is from the 1800s. The lay/priestly fraternities also make a profession according to their own way of life to the Master of the Order.
“Dominic’s order has produced 282 saints and blesseds: 183 martyrs and 99 non-martyrs.”
What exactly are “non-martyrs”?
“Dominique, nique, nique
S’en allait tout simplement
Routier, pauvre et chantant
En tous chemins, en tous lieux
Il ne parle que du bon Dieu
Il ne parle que du bon Dieu
À l’époque où Jean-sans-Terre
D’Angleterre était Roi
Dominique, notre Père
Convertit les Albigeois…”
********
We had Sister Luc’s(The Singing Nun) LP record at home growing up & I loved this song. It was a huge hit & #1 on the American charts for 4 weeks.
What a tragic story Sister had though. RIP.
There is at least one 16th century Dominican martyr, St. John of Cologne, who was one of the 19 “Martyrs of Gorkum” who were put to death on July 9, 1572 for refusing to abandon belief in the Eucharist and papal primacy.
As the painting shows, St. Dominic was an early user of drone technology.