Confessor Dominic

Saint Dominic de Guzmán, founder of the Order of Preachers and commonly commemorated in older Latin calendars as Dominic, Confessor, was born in the village of Caleruega in Old Castile. Standard accounts place his birth in 1170 and name his parents as Felix de Guzmán and Juana de Aza; Juana was later beatified. He received his first instruction from an uncle who was a priest and then studied the liberal arts and theology at Palencia. Early biographers, beginning with Jordan of Saxony, relate that during a famine he sold his books and other goods to relieve the hungry. After his studies he entered the cathedral chapter of Osma, a community of canons regular living under the Rule of Saint Augustine, and was ordained a priest. The chapter’s communal life and the Augustinian rule remained formative for the order he later founded.

In the early thirteenth century Dominic accompanied Bishop Diego de Acebo of Osma on journeys that took them through Languedoc, where Cathar (Albigensian) dualism was widespread. The contrast between the austere itinerant preachers of the heresy and the more comfortable appearance of many Catholic clergy prompted Dominic and Diego to adopt a ministry of preaching in evangelical poverty. After the bishop’s death Dominic remained in the region. About 1206–1207 he established a house at Prouille for women who had left Catharism; this community is regarded as the first house of Dominican nuns. For roughly a decade he preached in southern France and gathered a small group of companions dedicated to learned, itinerant preaching rather than to a purely monastic enclosure.

In 1215 Dominic was at Toulouse when the Fourth Lateran Council assembled in Rome. He sought papal recognition for a new order devoted to preaching and the care of souls. Pope Honorius III confirmed the Order of Preachers in bulls of 1216 and 1217. Dominic then sent brethren to the university centres of Paris and Bologna as well as to Spain and other regions, insisting on study, mobility, and communal poverty. The order took a modified Augustinian rule and developed a constitution based on elected superiors and regular general chapters. Dominic himself travelled widely, founding houses and presiding at the first general chapters held at Bologna in 1220 and 1221. Contemporary sources present him as a preacher and organizer rather than as an inquisitor; the later association of Dominicans with the papal Inquisition belongs to the subsequent history of the order.

Dominic died in the Dominican priory at Bologna on 6 August 1221. Pope Gregory IX, who had known him, canonized him on 13 July 1234. His relics rest in the arca di San Domenico in the basilica that bears his name in Bologna, a shrine later adorned by Niccolò dell’Arca and, in part, by the young Michelangelo. In the General Roman Calendar his feast is kept on 8 August (it was formerly 4 August). He is invoked as patron of astronomers, of scientists, of those falsely accused, of the Dominican Republic, and of the city of Santo Domingo. The mendicant order he founded became a major force in medieval universities, scholastic theology, and the preaching of doctrine throughout Latin Christendom.