Saint Dominic de Guzmán

To counter it, the Holy See sent legates and powerful Cistercian abbots. They rode magnificent horses, wore lavish vestments, and were escorted by noisy retinues, hoping to overwhelm their opponents with worldly authority. Yet the harder they tried, the worse they fared against the Albigensian leaders, the “perfect ones” (perfecti), who outwardly lived lives of great austerity: they fasted constantly, wore plain black robes and went barefoot preaching through the villages. Their hard way of life won over the poor, and the splendid legates, for all their orthodoxy, looked like hypocrites living in luxury off the people.

That priest was Dominic de Guzmán (Domingo de Guzmán) — founder of the Order of Preachers, usually called the Dominicans. With the fire of Truth (Veritas) and the Rosary, he opened a new chapter in the Church’s mission, joining contemplative silence to the preaching of God’s Word, so that the light of the Gospel might reach the darkest corners of the human heart. But before he changed the way the Church went about its mission, Dominic was a boy growing up on the dry highlands of Castile, carrying in his heart a dream that his own mother had seen even before he was born.

Tradition tells that before he was born, his mother dreamed that she gave birth to a little dog carrying a blazing torch in its mouth, running everywhere and setting the whole world alight. The dream was taken to foretell her son’s mission: to carry the torch of truth against the darkness of error and kindle the fire of God’s love all over the earth. Later, when the Dominican Order grew strong, medieval painters took that image — the dog carrying a torch — as a familiar symbol of the founder. There is also a famous Latin pun the Dominicans still fondly repeat: Domini canes — “the dogs of the Lord”, which sounds close to the name Dominicanes (Dominicans) and also evokes faithful guardians of the flock, ready to bark the alarm whenever the wolves of heresy creep in among the sheep.

At fourteen, Dominic was sent to the city of Palencia to study the liberal arts and theology at its renowned school — one of the oldest centers of learning on the Iberian Peninsula, which would later become the forerunner of the University of Valladolid. He studied there diligently for ten years, with an extraordinary memory and a deep love for the Word of God. He always carried with him the Gospel of Saint Matthew and the letters of Saint Paul, reading them until the parchment pages were worn thin from turning, and it is said that he knew almost all of both by heart.

When his classmates reproached him in surprise, thinking he had foolishly traded away his whole academic future, Dominic gave an answer that has never been forgotten:

“How can I sit still and study these dead skins, while the living pages of Christ, my poor brothers and sisters, are dying of hunger in the streets?”

His compassion so moved the professors and students that they took up a collection of their own, which saved thousands of lives. A young man ready to sell the very tools of his study to save others was no dry scholar who knew only words. It was the first sign that in Dominic, knowledge and love would never be separated.

In 1196, he was ordained a priest and joined the cathedral chapter of Osma, living under the Rule of Saint Augustine — a community of priests living together, keeping strict religious discipline, devoted to the liturgy and the study of Scripture. He lived a contemplative life, keeping vigil in prayer all night while the other canons slept, and before long his brothers trusted him enough to elect him subprior of the chapter. If his life had gone on like that, Dominic might have become a holy but hidden priest, spending his whole life within the four walls of the cathedral of Osma. But God had another path for him, and that path began with what looked like a simple diplomatic errand.

Stopping for the night at an inn in the city of Toulouse — a busy center of trade and also one of the main strongholds of the Cathar movement — Father Dominic noticed that the innkeeper was a fervent follower of the heresy. Instead of going to bed after a long, tiring day in the saddle, he sat down at the table with the innkeeper, by the flickering candlelight of a winter night in the south of France.

With rare gentleness, a deep knowledge of Scripture and complete respect for the other man, and with none of the heavy-handed authority the legates relied on, he sat talking and debating with him all night until morning. One by one the false arguments of the heresy gave way, not to heavy accusations, but to patient explanation, step by step: the true meaning of creation, of the human body as a temple of the Holy Spirit and not a prison of the devil, and of the Savior’s merciful love, shown in verse after verse of Scripture that Father Dominic quoted without a book, from a memory steeped in it for years.

In 1206, at Prouille — a small village not far from Toulouse — Father Dominic founded the first convent of nuns, for women who had just left the Albigensian heresy and returned to the Church. Many of them came from poor backgrounds and had been raised and educated for free by the Cathar “perfect women” — one of the reasons the heresy spread so quickly among the poor. Prouille became the praying heart of the mission: there the sisters quietly upheld the hard work of the preachers outside.

Pope Honorius III solemnly approved the Order of Preachers, the Dominican Order, by a bull dated December 22, 1216, and called its friars “champions of the faith and true lights of the world”. Dominican spirituality is summed up in a phrase of Saint Thomas Aquinas — who would join the order less than thirty years later: Contemplari et contemplata aliis tradere, meaning to contemplate, and to hand on to others the fruits of contemplation.

He taught his friars that before opening their mouths to preach to others, the preacher himself must spend many hours in silence before the Eucharist so that the Word of God would soak into him and not remain dry arguments learned by heart. He gave them a rule still repeated in Dominican houses all over the world:

“A Dominican speaks only with God, or about God!”

He sent them to the two greatest universities of the Western world at the time: Paris, home to the sharpest theological minds in Europe, and Bologna, the cradle of law and also the place where he himself would later breathe his last. He wanted his friars in the lecture halls, mastering the best philosophy and science of the age, so they could put that learning at the service of the faith rather than preaching with zeal alone. That bold move made the Dominicans the greatest intellectual and theological force of the medieval Church, producing giants like Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, who carried on along the road Dominic had opened.

Church tradition has also long linked Saint Dominic with the origin of the Rosary. Tradition tells that during the hard years of struggle against the Albigensian heresy, when reasoned debate was sometimes not strong enough to move hearts that had grown too hard, Our Lady appeared and gave him the Rosary as a powerful spiritual weapon — a simple way of prayer that even poorly educated country people could use, quite different from complex theological debates meant only for scholars.

He used those simple beads to teach the mysteries of the Incarnation, Passion and Resurrection of Jesus, making the Rosary a popular prayer that nourished the faith of millions of poor people through the centuries. A tiny seed sown in the hard days in Languedoc grew into one of the most widespread prayers in the whole Catholic Church.

By day he walked tirelessly preaching under scorching sun or steady rain, never counting his weariness; by night he almost never slept in a bed. He spent whole sleepless nights in the church, lying prostrate before the altar, beating his breast and weeping bitterly. His brothers often heard him crying out in the depths of the night, when he thought no one was listening:

“Lord, what will become of sinners? Where is Your mercy for them?”

That was not the lament of a theologian reasoning about sin in the abstract, but the cry of a true shepherd carrying in his heart the burden of every lost soul he had met on the road.

An ancient work called “The Nine Ways of Prayer of Saint Dominic”, written down by disciples who had watched him pray, describes how he prayed with his whole body: sometimes kneeling with his head bowed to the ground in repentance, sometimes lying prostrate on the cold stone floor of the church, sometimes standing motionless for hours with his arms outstretched in the shape of a cross, sometimes standing upright with both hands raised high to heaven as if begging for an urgent favor. For him prayer was not just a matter of the mind or the lips; it was the whole person, body and soul, turned toward God.

Hard on himself, he was gentle, cheerful and full of compassion toward others, a contrast that surprised everyone who met him. The witnesses at his canonization process, people who had lived beside him for many years, all agreed:

“No one ever saw him sad or angry; his face was always radiant with the joy of the Holy Spirit!”

That combination, strict with himself and always smiling with others, became a hallmark of Dominican life, handed down through generations of friars.

To the sons kneeling and weeping around him he left a last testament that summed up everything he had lived for:

When the brothers, weeping, asked who would guide the young order once he was gone, he smiled and comforted them:

“Do not weep, my sons! I shall be more useful to you after my death; I shall intercede for you before God more effectively than when I was still living on this earth!”

His body is kept today in a magnificent tomb called the Arca di San Domenico — the Shrine of Saint Dominic — placed in its own chapel inside the Basilica of San Domenico in Bologna. The tomb itself shows how Dominic’s work went on bearing fruit through the centuries: begun by the sculptor Nicola Pisano in 1264, then continued by generation after generation of craftsmen, including carvings from the hand of a very young Michelangelo at the end of the fifteenth century — a work that took nearly five hundred years to complete, as if European art itself wanted a share in honoring the humble saint who died on a torn mat.

In Vietnam, the Dominican Order has deep roots: Spanish Dominican missionaries laid firm foundations for the dioceses of the North, the former Eastern and Central Vicariates, and among the one hundred seventeen Vietnamese Martyr Saints, thirty-eight belong to the Dominican family, including bishops, priests, brothers and lay Third Order members. Saint Dominic’s Rosary — the spiritual gift he received amid the hard years of struggle against heresy in Languedoc — has nourished the faith of Vietnamese Catholics for generations, from old people praying the Rosary on their porches to families gathering for evening prayers.