By DEB PIROCH
On being threatened with death for preaching to the heretical Albigensians, they asked St. Dominic what he would have done had they captured him. His answer was:
“I would have asked you not to kill me all at once, but to cut me up member by member, so as to give me a lingering martyrdom. Then, before you plucked out my eyes, I would ask you to hold before me each part you had cut from my body. After all that, you could let the rest of my body roll about in its own blood or you could kill me altogether” —First biographer, Jordan of Saxony, who knew St. Dominic.
Sense of humor he must have had. Born of pious parents in Castile, Spain, his mother Jane was later beatified. Dominic’s brothers were also pious, one a priest to whom miracles were ascribed, and the other a religious, as well. His uncle, an archpriest, helped bring him up, for his mother had dreamt even before his birth (1170) that Dominic would set the world on fire preaching for God.
Elsewhere, the year of Dominic’s birth was the same year Thomas Becket was murdered in the cathedral. Twelve years later St. Francis of Assisi was born, with whom he would be friends.
Naturally, Dominic became a priest. And for a time, he seemed like so many model priests: He was prayerful and wept in remorse for the sins of the world. Then after a time the king of Castile asked the bishop of Osma to help in the arrangements of the marriage of his son and the bishop asked Dominic to accompany him.
On the journey, they passed through southern France, which was badly afflicted with Albigenses. This heresy was more than a heresy; it was another religion. Dominic spent the entire night talking with the innkeeper and by morning had changed the man’s false beliefs. He had found his calling.
The Albigensian heresy believed that everything on Earth was evil. Christ was not God, the Earth was Hell, there would be no resurrection, and suicide was good in that it liberated us from the Earth. Evil, too, was having children. Chastity was good but so was leaving one’s spouse. They approved of fasts and believed at death the soul migrated to a better place. All of this was strongly condemned by the Church and even sometimes punished with capital punishment. While too rigorous a penalty, certainly, the only response to make today is that capital punishment in the Middle Ages was often imposed for offenses — even stealing food — that it would never be used for now; it was a product of the times.
Dominic understood that one of the reasons that the heresy had gained ground was due to laxity or corruption in the Church. Religious would show up in rich carriages with servants. Dominic said no, abandon these and show up without a carriage at all and barefoot, and be prepared to debate. After ten years of preaching with his own disciples, the Holy Father allowed Dominic to form his own order, using the Rule of St. Augustine. At first, Pope Innocent had been planning to refuse, only he dreamt he saw the Lateran — which was the home of the Popes till the fourteenth century — perilously close to collapse. Then Dominic appeared and kept it standing.
The same year Dominic had a vision, too: He saw that God’s anger at man’s sin in the world was held back only by our Lady, who in turn pointed to two figures. He recognized himself as one but did not know the other, a man who seemed like a beggar. That person, he later learned, was St. Francis of Assisi.
Key to the new order of Dominic was that they would be “Friar Preachers.” Indeed, a year earlier in prayer, asking for help with this order, he had another vision. According to his biographer, the Apostles Peter and Paul approached him and confirmed him in forming this order, stating he had been chosen by God to do this work.
Dominic frequently spent much of his nights in prayer. He used the discipline three times a day: for himself, sinners in the world, and the Poor Souls. He was seen to levitate, and prophesied things about which he would have not had knowledge. He worked miracles. One involved being able to suddenly preach in German, another involved saving a boatload of people who had been drowning. He threw himself into prayer, and in doing so, their bodies rose up high enough out of the water to be rescued by those on shore.
As he was mystically inclined, the Blessed Virgin was the one to show him the new habit his order would wear.
He had the gift of prophecy. Sometimes this comes with an element of foreboding, as when Christ foretold that one of the apostles would betray him. This from Dominic’s first biographer:
“While the friars were still living at San Sisto in Rome and the man of God, Dominic, was among them, he seemed to receive a sudden inspiration from the Lord and summoned the friars to chapter. There he publicly announced that, very shortly, four of them would die: two a bodily death and two a spiritual death. Not long after, the event matched the prediction, for, within a short time, two of them paid their debt of the body and went to the Lord, but two others returned to the world and left the order completely.”
There is one other aspect of the saint that must be mentioned, naming the role he had in the evolution of the rosary. According to an article by Fr. Paul Duffner OP, St. Dominic was greatly devoted to our Lady, and turned to her for help in countering the heresy he was fighting. She responded by asking him to employ her Psalter. The rosary as such did not exist at that time as it does today; rather one said 150 Pater Nosters or Aves only, and the second part of the Hail Mary was not yet written. Mysteries like today were not employed, there was only a circlet to the rosary and the word rosary was not known.
Yet St. Dominic would pray Hail Marys, preach on the life of Christ, rather like a mystery, and then return to more Hail Marys and so on. So truly, it was like a rosary.
Belgian Jesuits who assembled the “Acta Sanctorum” on the saints decided there was not enough data to state St. Dominic had been instrumental in establishing the rosary, given that only one man, Alan de Rupe, OP, in 1475, had claimed it, and no other documents found. (Dominican friar Alan de Rupe reputedly received Fifteen Rosary Promises through private revelation from the Blessed Virgin.)
But many documents are lost or destroyed with time, and Pope Benedict XIV was quite clear in voicing his opinion on the matter:
“You ask whether St. Dominic was the first institutor of the Rosary. . . . Now, what value do you attach to the testimony of so many Popes, such as Leo X (1521), Pius V (1572), Gregory VIII (1585), Sixtus V (1590), Clement VIII (1605), Alexander VII (1667), Blessed Innocent XI (1689), Clement XI (1721), Innocent XIII (1724), and others who unanimously attribute the institution of the Rosary to St. Dominic?”
Sometimes St. Dominic would spread his arms wide in prayer, in imitation of Christ crucified, such as when he threw himself into supplication for those drowning to save them.
Lent is approaching. The Cross is before us. Let us spread our own arms wide, look into His face and offer up ourselves: so we may change for the better, so that we may strive for the words we hope one day to hear: “Amen I say to thee: This day thou shalt be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43).
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