Today, 8 August, the Church keeps Saint Dominic de Guzmán (c. 1170–1221). He did something simple and rare: he believed heresy is not beaten by power but by true preaching from genuinely poor men. Out of that conviction came the Order of Preachers — the Dominicans — and with them a good share of the best theology the Church has. Here is his life, his method, the question of the Rosary, and the prayer of his Mass in Latin and English.
A canon who sold his books
He was born at Caleruega in Old Castile around 1170 and studied at Palencia. While still a student the episode happened that sums up the whole man: famine struck the region, and Dominic sold the parchments he had annotated by hand — the most expensive thing a twelfth-century student could own — to buy food. To those who found it strange he said he would not study on dead skins while men were dying.
He became a canon regular of the cathedral of Osma under Bishop Diego de Acebo, and there he would have stayed but for a diplomatic journey.
The night at Toulouse
In 1203, travelling with Bishop Diego on an embassy to the king of Castile, he crossed the Languedoc — country then held by the Cathars, also called Albigensians. They stopped at an inn in Toulouse, and the innkeeper was a heretic.
Dominic sat up the whole night talking with him. By morning the man had returned to the Catholic faith. Two things settled in Dominic's mind that night and shaped everything after: heresy is met one man at a time, and nobody believes a man who preaches poverty while arriving on horseback with a retinue.
The papal legates crossed the Languedoc with escort and baggage. The Cathars walked and fasted. Dominic drew the blunt conclusion: the problem was not the argument, it was the witness.
The method: poverty, study, preaching
He and Diego sent the horses back and went barefoot, begging their bread. They preached across southern France for ten years, with modest results and a high personal cost. In 1206, at Prouille, Dominic founded a house for women converted from Catharism who had nowhere to return to — the first Dominican monastery came before the Order itself, and it was made of women.
In 1215 he gathered a small band of companions at Toulouse. The following year, 1216, Honorius III confirmed the Order of Preachers. Dominic took the Rule of Saint Augustine and added what made it unlike anything else.
- Real poverty, not decorative. The friars begged. No property, no rents, none of the security that dulls a man's speech.
- Study as duty, not luxury. Dominic was the first to dispense friars from manual work so they could study. His Order produced Thomas Aquinas and Albert the Great inside a single generation.
- Preaching as the end, not an extra. The Order's official name is literally Order of Preachers. Everything — prayer, study, common life — exists so that somebody preaches better.
- Government by vote. Priors were elected; chapters decided. In feudal Europe this was close to scandalous.
- Deliberate scattering. In 1217 he sent the few friars he had to Paris, Bologna, Rome and Spain. He was told it was far too soon. He answered that hoarded grain rots and scattered grain bears fruit.
In art Saint Dominic nearly always has a black-and-white dog with a torch in its mouth — the animal at the foot of the painting above, beside the globe.
It comes from a medieval pun: Dominicanes sounds like Domini canes, “the hounds of the Lord” — who guard the flock and carry fire through the world. The colours are the habit's: white tunic, black cappa.
The Rosary
The tradition the Church holds most dearly about Saint Dominic happened at Prouille. Preaching was not prevailing, the heresy was spreading, and he had come to the end of his own strength. It was then that Our Lady appeared to him and gave him the Rosary, telling him this would be the weapon to win that country back.
Dominic began to preach it. He taught ploughmen and spinners to repeat the Hail Marys while walking through the mysteries of Christ's life in their memory — and what the arguments of the learned had failed to do, that simple prayer did. The Languedoc came back to the faith.
After him it was his friars who carried the Rosary across Europe: they preached it from square to square, founded the Rosary confraternities, and put it into the hands of people who could not read. It is why, in art, Dominic nearly always appears receiving the beads from the Virgin.
Facing the Turkish fleet, Pope Saint Pius V — himself a Dominican — ordered all Christendom to pray the Rosary for victory.
The battle was won that day, and the Pope credited the outcome to Our Lady, not to the guns. From it came the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, which the Church keeps on 7 October.
Centuries later Leo XIII would write twelve encyclicals on the Rosary, naming Dominic in several of them as the one to whom the Virgin entrusted it.
If you would like to pray it in the Church's own words, there is a collection of Latin and English prayers here on the site.
Bologna, and the end
He spent his last years walking through Italy, France and Spain, nearly always preaching and nearly always hungry. He died at Bologna on 6 August 1221, just past fifty, laid on another friar's habit because he owned no bed. Gregory IX canonised him in 1234, thirteen years later.
He left no writings. He left an Order, and what the Order wrote after him — the Summa Theologiae included — is his book.
“A man who governs his passions is master of the world. We must either rule them, or be ruled by them.”— attributed to Saint Dominic
“Hoarded grain rots in the barn; scattered, it bears fruit.”— Saint Dominic, on dispersing the first friars
The prayer of his Mass
The Collect asks something very concrete: that the Church, lit by Dominic's merits and teaching, may not be left without what she needs to live, and may grow in what actually matters.
Deus, qui Ecclésiam tuam beáti Domínici Confessóris tui illumináre dignátus es méritis et doctrínis: concéde; ut eius intercessióne temporálibus non destituátur auxíliis, et spirituálibus semper profíciat increméntis. Per Dóminum nostrum Iesum Christum.
O God, who were pleased to enlighten your Church by the merits and the teaching of blessed Dominic your confessor: grant that by his intercession she may not be left destitute of temporal help, and may ever grow in spiritual increase. Through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Amen.
And this second is the antiphon the Dominicans sing every night before their founder's image at the end of Compline — seven praises in seven words:
O lumen Ecclésiae, Doctor veritátis, rosa patiéntiae, ebur castitátis, aquam sapiéntiae propinásti gratis: praedicátor grátiae, nos iunge beátis.
O light of the Church, teacher of truth, rose of patience, ivory of chastity: freely you gave the water of wisdom to drink. Preacher of grace, unite us with the blessed.
Amen.
Sancte Dominice, ora pro nobis. Saint Dominic, pray for us — and win us the courage to tell the truth with nothing of our own to defend.
- Saint Alphonsus Liguori — the Doctor of prayer and the Glories of Mary.
- Saint Ignatius of Loyola — another order born of a radical conversion.
- Words of the saints — a growing collection, in English and Portuguese.
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