The saints

Saint Dominic

Founder · Feast day August 8 · About 1170 to 1221 · Spain, France, and Italy · Also known as Dominic de Guzman, Domingo

Saint Dominic was a Spanish priest who, seeing whole regions of Europe drifting from the faith through ignorance and false teaching, founded the Order of Preachers, the Dominicans, to win souls not by force but by learning, poverty, and the joyful preaching of the truth. His friars became the great teachers and missionaries of the church, and the greatest of them was Thomas Aquinas.

How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher?Romans 10:14 (KJV)

The compassionate scholar of Castile

Dominic was born around the year 1170 in the village of Caleruega in Castile, in Spain, into a devout family, and by tradition his mother, before his birth, dreamed she carried a dog bearing a torch that would set the world alight, an image the later Dominicans loved. He was sent as a boy to be educated by an uncle who was a priest, and then to the schools of Palencia, where for years he gave himself to the study of Scripture and theology with a devotion that marked him out. A famous story from his student days captures his character: during a severe famine, Dominic sold his precious and costly books, the tools of his whole vocation, to feed the starving poor, saying that he would not study off dead skins while living men and women were dying of hunger before his eyes.

Ordained a priest, he joined the community of canons attached to the cathedral of Osma and lived quietly among them for some years, a man of prayer and study, giving no sign yet of the world-changing work ahead. He might have spent his whole life in that peaceful round of worship and learning. But a journey across Europe in the company of his bishop brought him face to face with a spiritual crisis that would seize the rest of his life and turn the scholar into a founder.

The crisis that made a mission

Traveling with his bishop through the south of France, Dominic came into a region overrun by the Cathar or Albigensian movement, a widespread and deeply rooted heresy that rejected the goodness of the material creation, denied the true humanity of Christ and the goodness of the body, and had drawn away enormous numbers of people from the church. Dominic saw with a clear and pained eye that the official church had answered this crisis badly. It had sent proud, richly dressed, well-fed legates who traveled in state and impressed no one, and who by their evident worldliness only confirmed the Cathars in their contempt for a church that did not practice what it preached.

Dominic became convinced that error of this kind could never be conquered by wealth, pomp, or force, but only by preachers who lived in genuine, visible poverty, who knew the faith so deeply that they could answer every objection, and who could win hearts by the transparent holiness of their own lives. He began at once to put the conviction into practice, traveling on foot and barefoot, begging his bread, debating the Cathar teachers gently and at length, and living the simplicity he preached, so that his message and his manner of life said the same thing. He labored in that hard mission field for years, with patience and love rather than the sword, and out of it the idea for a whole new kind of order slowly took shape in his mind.

The Order of Preachers

Out of that conviction Dominic founded a new kind of religious order, the Order of Preachers, approved by the pope in 1216, whose entire reason for existing was to preach the gospel, refute error, and save souls. His friars would be poor, owning nothing and begging their bread, so that no one could ever accuse them, as the Cathars had accused the old legates, of preaching for gain or comfort. But unlike the earlier monks, they would not remain hidden behind cloister walls; they were made for the road, sent out into the towns, the roads, and above all the universities of Europe, wherever people were and wherever ideas were being formed and fought over.

Dominic's boldest and most far-reaching decision was to place study at the very heart of the order and to make learning itself a form of prayer and preparation for preaching, for he was utterly certain that a man cannot preach well what he does not deeply know. He sent his very first friars, against the caution of others, straight to the great universities of Paris and Bologna to be trained in theology, and the gamble transformed the church. The Dominicans became the intellectual engine of medieval Christianity, producing theologians, teachers, and missionaries in astonishing numbers for centuries. The greatest of them all, Thomas Aquinas, was a Dominican, the direct fruit of Dominic's conviction that a mind fully surrendered to God is one of the mightiest instruments the gospel can have.

Preaching, poverty, and the endless road

Dominic spent the remaining years of his life almost constantly on the roads of Europe, walking many thousands of miles between Spain, France, and Italy to preach, to found new houses of friars, and to guide his fast-growing order in person. He was known everywhere for his tireless energy, his unfailing cheerfulness, and his habit of speaking of God or to God at all hours, so that his companions said he only ever spoke either with God in prayer or about God to other people, and of almost nothing else. He often traveled barefoot over rough country, gave away whatever he had to the poor he met, and spent his nights in prayer after days of walking, frequently found weeping in the churches where he kept vigil, crying out to God to have mercy on sinners.

He governed the order he founded with a wisdom that long outlasted him, insisting on genuine community life, careful and demanding study, real and unfeigned poverty, and a remarkably free structure in which the friars themselves shared in electing their leaders and shaping their common life, a durable and almost democratic form of governance rare for the age. He refused every offer to be made a bishop, wanting only to remain to the end a poor preaching friar among his brothers. The rosary, the beloved chain of prayers meditating on the life of Christ, is by long Dominican tradition associated with Dominic, though its exact historical origins are debated among scholars and cannot be traced to him with certainty.

A light left burning for the church

Dominic worked himself to exhaustion in the service of the gospel. Still a relatively young man, his body worn out by years of walking, fasting, hard travel, and ceaseless preaching, he fell mortally ill at Bologna in the summer of 1221. As he lay dying among his grieving friars he gave them his last testament, a spoken summary of everything he had lived and labored for, three things he told them to hold onto above all: have charity among yourselves, guard humility, and keep willing poverty. He told them too, in words the order has never forgotten, that they should not weep, for he would be of more use to them after his death and would help them more surely from heaven than he ever had while living, and he commended them to the God whose truth he had spent his whole strength to proclaim.

Within only thirteen years he was declared a saint. The order he founded spread rapidly across the whole of Europe and then across the world, and it endures to this day, still preaching, still teaching in the universities, still sending out missionaries, an unbroken line running from the roads of thirteenth-century France to the far corners of the earth. His mendicant friars, together with the Franciscans who arose in the same generation, renewed the whole church in their century, met a wave of confusion and unbelief with holiness and truth, and carried the living gospel back into places where it had grown cold and formal.

Why Dominic still matters

Dominic teaches that the answer to a confused, drifting, and skeptical world is not force, fear, or worldly power, but the truth spoken in love by people who visibly live what they preach. He is the patron of astronomers and of the falsely accused, and the enduring proof that study and prayer, poverty and preaching, the mind and the heart, belong together and are strongest when joined. How shall they hear, Paul asked, without a preacher, and Dominic spent his whole life making sure that they would hear, and raising up a great and lasting army of learned, humble, joyful preachers to make sure that they still do, eight centuries later.

A note for all traditions: the saints are honored across the church as examples of faith and, in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, as friends who pray with us, never worshiped, for worship belongs to God alone. What Scripture records and what later tradition holds are distinguished above. In every tradition there is one Lord, Jesus Christ, and every believer, not only the saints, is called to follow him.

Related: Saint Thomas Aquinas · How to pray · Saints for August 8 · Saint of the day