In 1216 St Dominic travelled to Rome seeking confirmation from the Holy Father of a new and bold plan: he proposed to form the band of enthusiastic and energetic young men that had gathered around him in Toulouse into an “Order of Preachers” dedicated to the study and proclamation of the Word of God on behalf of a Church whose missionary zeal had cooled. This Order of Preachers would popularly become known as Dominicans, and has attracted new members in every generation since its foundation.
The order can boast among its ranks some of the great saints of the Church including St Thomas Aquinas, St Catherine of Siena and St Martin de Porres, and although there have been some low moments over the course of the eight centuries of the order’s history, its members have a proud record of passing on the Word of God to men and women across the globe and down the generations.
Currently the Dominican order worldwide is enjoying something of a resurgence. The last 15 years have seen the number of friars increase significantly, and while not every province of the order is flourishing as perhaps it might, every region of the world has at least one province that is experiencing a surge in vocations, including the United States, Columbia, Nigeria, India, the Philippines, Poland and, though on a much smaller scale, even England and Ireland.
The American Dominican Archbishop Augustine Di Noia OP suggested in a lecture to his confrères in 2010 that, ultimately, there can only be one explanation for this great blessing of new vocations: the Dominican charism must be “urgently needed in the Church today”.
In forming the Order of Preachers, St Dominic put his finger on an essential dimension of the Church’s life. He summoned his friars to follow the way of Christ the Preacher, and to imitate those disciples that Our Lord sent out two by two with no purse or haversack or sandals to proclaim the Kingdom of God.
In this way St Dominic testified that mission is not an optional extra in the life of the Church; it is part of what it means to be a member of the Body of Christ.
He positioned his order close to the heart of the life of the Church, and thus it is perhaps not so surprising that the order continues to be blessed with vocations even when parts of the wider Church are under great stress.
St Dominic’s fundamental insight thus bequeathed his order a very clear historical (and indeed Scriptural) identity which has served the order well even into the beginning of the 21st century. But as every Religious knows, the reasons why young men and women join an order are not always the reasons why they stay.
If a vocation is to be sustained it must be nurtured and nourished, and perhaps it is here that the genius of St Dominic becomes most apparent.
St Dominic’s understanding of his own calling steadily matured during his many years of hard apostolic graft as a preacher in southern France. At the time this region was under the sway of a heretical doctrine that saw no inherent goodness or dignity in the human body or indeed the material world more broadly. As a consequence, its adherents celebrated suicide, discouraged procreation and renounced the Sacraments.
Here St Dominic was brought face to face with the misery and suffering that inevitably flows from distorted ideas about who God is and how human beings relate to Him. He concluded that if men and women are to live in friendship with God and neighbour in this life and enjoy eternal happiness with God in the next, then they need to be nourished by the Truth: how we think about God matters.
St Dominic therefore placed a search for Truth at the heart of his newly formed order. He did not want preaching to be the brethren’s job; he wanted them to be truthful witnesses of the Good News. Here, perhaps, we come close to the heart of St Dominic’s religious experience. He was on a quest for the Truth, but until we see God face to face the fullness of Truth will always be beyond our grasp: instead, through his search for Truth, St Dominic found freedom and in that freedom joy.
It is that same freedom in the Truth of the Gospel that St Dominic wished his brothers to come to know and to share with the rest of the world. We live in an age that is hungry for authenticity and where truth is at a premium. Perhaps the worldwide resurgence of the order is simply a confirmation of St Dominic’s original intuition: we yearn to know the Truth, and it is the Truth that sets us free.
Fr Nicholas Crowe OP is director of vocations for the English Province of the Order of Preachers
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