Feast day: August 8

St. Dominic

Priest & Founder · 1170–1221

Patron of Astronomers, the Dominican Order, preachers

Spanish priest who founded the Order of Preachers to win minds with truth and poverty rather than force — and championed the Rosary.

Dominic de Guzmán was born about 1170 in Castile, Spain, and became a priest and canon of the cathedral of Osma, devoted to study and prayer. Traveling through southern France with his bishop, he came face to face with the Albigensian heresy, which despised the body and the material world, and saw that it was winning the people partly because its preachers lived austerely while many Catholic clergy did not.

Dominic concluded that error had to be met with both sound teaching and visible holiness — by preachers who were learned enough to argue and poor enough to be believed. He spent years preaching in the troubled region, going on foot and in poverty, and gathered companions who shared his method. From this grew the Order of Preachers — the Dominicans — approved by the pope in 1216.

It was a new kind of religious order, built around preaching and study for the salvation of souls, combining the contemplative life with active mission. Convinced that good preaching required deep learning, Dominic boldly sent his small band of friars to the great universities of Paris and Bologna, scattering them, he said, like seed that would bear fruit only if sown widely.

He is closely associated with the spread of the Rosary as a way of preaching the mysteries of Christ to ordinary people. Worn out by ceaseless travel and labor, he died at Bologna in 1221, telling his weeping brethren he would be more useful to them after death than in life. He was canonized in 1234, and his order has given the Church many of its greatest theologians and saints.

As a student he sold his hand-copied books — worth a fortune — to feed famine victims: 'I will not study on dead skins while living skins starve.'

“Arm yourself with prayer rather than a sword.”
— St. Dominic

Image: Claudio Coello (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/05106a.htm