The Liturgical Calendar: The Church Remembers

Today the church remembers Dominic, Priest and Friar, 1221.

The church has often been tempted to deal harshly and angrily with heresy and sometimes defeats its own purposes in so doing, betraying the Lord"s own teaching. This seemed to be the case in the crusade against the Albigensian heretics. Dominic, a learned and pious Spanish aristocrat, became deeply concerned about the situation and founded an Order of Preachers whose special task was to combat heresy with sound learning and intelligent preaching, rather than with force of arms. Members of this order came to be called “Dominicans,” or in England, “Blackfriars,” because of their black habit.

The Dominicans produced some of the greatest scholars and teachers of medieval Europe, including Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. They contributed significantly to the rise of the universities. Dominic was a prodigious organizer and designed for his order a form of representative government, unique among monastic orders of his day. Dominic"s godson, Simon de Montfort, became a leader among the English barons, and the Angevin kings of England favored the Dominicans. Today, the Order of Preachers is still active throughout the world.

Eternal God, help us to proclaim your Word, that all people may know your love. Amen.

Read the Wikipedia article here.

O God of the prophets, you opened the eyes of your servant Dominic to perceive a famine of hearing the word of the Lord, and moved him, and those he drew about him, to satisfy that hunger with sound preaching and fervent devotion: Make your Church, dear Lord, in this and every age, attentive to the hungers of the world, and quick to respond in love to those who are perishing; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

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