Saint Dominic

Priest

Feast Day

August 8

Life

1170–1221

Canonized

1234

Order

Order of Preachers (Dominicans, OP)

Born

Caleruega, Castile

Saint Dominic was born Domingo de Guzman at Caleruega in Castile in 1170, of the noble Guzman family. He received his early education under his uncle, the archpriest of Gumiel, and his higher studies at the University of Palencia, where he distinguished himself by selling his books and parchment manuscripts to feed the poor during a famine. About 1196 he was incorporated as canon regular in the cathedral chapter of Osma, where he became sub-prior and lived a strict, contemplative, common life.

In 1203, accompanying Bishop Diego of Osma on a diplomatic mission to Denmark on behalf of King Alfonso VIII of Castile, Dominic encountered for the first time the Albigensian (Catharist) heretics of Languedoc; their dualist preaching, which denied the goodness of the body and of marriage, struck him as the great catechetical and preaching emergency of the day. Returning south in 1206, he and Bishop Diego proposed to Pope Innocent III a new style of preaching: barefoot, mendicant friars, learned in theology and Scripture, traveling among the heretics and preaching by example as well as by word. From this proposal grew the Order of Preachers, formally instituted by Pope Honorius III in the bulls Religiosam vitam (December 22, 1216) and Gratiarum omnium largitori (January 21, 1217).

Dominic established his first community at Toulouse in 1215 and dispersed his sixteen original brethren throughout Europe in 1217, sending them to the universities of Paris and Bologna with the famous instruction Hoarded grain rots; scattered, it bears fruit. The order rapidly developed a structured rule, conventual life, common chapter government, dispensability from manual labor for study, and a chosen poverty. The Dominican charism made the new order the principal preaching, missionary, and theological force of the high medieval Church.

Dominic himself walked tirelessly across Europe in his last six years, preaching, founding houses, and presiding over the first general chapters at Bologna (1220, 1221). He died at the priory of Saint Nicholas of the Vines in Bologna on August 6, 1221. Pope Gregory IX canonized him on July 3, 1234. Although the historical evidence does not directly attest the popular tradition that the Blessed Virgin gave him the Rosary in a vision (the Rosary as a structured Marian prayer of one hundred and fifty Hail Marys with mysteries developed gradually in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, especially through the Carthusian Dominic of Prussia and the Dominican Alanus de Rupe), the Dominican Order has been the principal historical promoter of the devotion since the fifteenth century.