CATCHING
FIRE FROM DOMINIC’S VISION
LIGHT FOR THE CHURCH
Liam G. Walsh, OP
Presented at a meeting of the International Commissions of the
Dominican Order, Prouilhe, France, April, 2006 celebrating the coming
800th anniversary of the foundations of the Order.
1.
Flame, fire, torch, light - they are images we use for what Dominic
is for us. For us. Who and what is this ‘us’? Who are
the ‘we’ that Dominic is ‘for’, what are ‘we’?
Dominicans, indeed. But we can only be Dominicans because first we
are Church. It is as lumen ecclesiae, not lumen ordinis that we salute
Dominic day after day. It was in being ‘light of the Church’
that he became and is light, torch, flame, fire for us for whom he
is elder brother and founding father. His passion was to bring light
to the Church. It was to make that light shine and continue shining
that he gathered sisters and brothers around him and made them Preachers.
And, of course, the Church is light, not for itself but for the world.
The light that Dominic made to burn more brightly in the Church is
the light that makes it be lumen gentium.
2. The Church. Lumen gentium. What is it, where is it, who is it?
What does it mean to us that we are of, that we are in, that, indeed,
we simply are the Church? If that question is in our hearts and on
our lips today it was no less surely in the heart and on the lips
of Dominic as, eight hundred years ago, he walked these roads of Languedoc
where we walk today. What grew out of his contemplation as he walked
those ways, and what became the active driving vision enlightening
everything he did in the fifteen years of life that remained to him?
I believe it was an understanding of the light that should burn in
the Church, a light that the Church should be if it was to be the
light of the world. It was what made Dominic first join the sacra
praedicatio that already existed, then take charge of it, then re-model
it and make it the paradigm for a complex network of institutions
that now forms the family of sisters and brothers who serve the ‘holy
preaching’ in the Church of today and call themselves Order
of Preachers, Dominicans. Dominic lived that vision himself and bound
others together to live it. It was what made him lumen ecclesiae,
and be the flame that we want to take fire from, so that we collectively,
in our day, can be lumen ecclesiae.
The Ecclesiology of Dominic
3. What I want to do, sisters and brothers, is to invite you to try
to enter into the ecclesiology of Dominic as it is manifested in the
things he did during those fifteen years. I am asking you to try to
imagine for yourselves how he would have thought about the Church
and how that understanding of the Church is expressed in the things
he did to promote ‘holy preaching’ in the Church. Let
us try to enter into Dominic’s ecclesiology. It might well be
the deepest source of the light, the flame, the fire that we want
to bring to the world today by our preaching.
4. It is, of course, something of an anachronism to speak of the ecclesiology
of Dominic, and to speak about it in a way that contrasts it with
other models of ecclesiology that can be used to think about the Church.
Ecclesiology as a theological subject did not come to exist until
some centuries after Dominic. But he had an ecclesiology, even if
he did not call it that. He had a theological understanding of the
Church. He had it, as Thomas will have it after him, within a theology
that was about God before it was about Popes and prelates and power.
It was part of his understanding of the God who gathers all his children
to himself in Christ and the Spirit. It was an understanding of how
his parents Jane and Felix were, by living the Christian life, more
foundational in the Church than his priest uncle. It was an understanding
of how the evangelical life-style adopted by his bishop Diego was
more important than his episcopal authority. At the same time it was
distinguished from other charismatic ecclesiologies that were appearing
in the world of Dominic’s day in that it gave an integral and
necessary place to Popes, Bishops and priests and to their authority
in the preaching of the Gospel and the ministry of sacraments.
5. So let us try to imagine Dominic’s ecclesiology. He first
encountered the Church in his home in Caleruega, at home with Jane
and Felix his parents, and with his brothers Antonio and Mannes. He
belonged to, grew up in the primary lay reality of the Church, with
its domestic and social ministries. He encountered other ministries
of the Church, the ordained ones, in the parish church where he was
baptized and took part in the Eucharist. He encountered the teaching
Church with his priest uncle who educated him and at the university
of Palencia where he studied. It is recorded that during those years
at Palencia he encountered the reality of the Church in a profound
way, that would prepare him for more dramatic encounters of the same
kind in later life. He came upon a woman who, not having the social
and economic resources that sheltered Dominic from the famine and
pestilence that was devastating the city, was poor and hungry. The
Church appeared to Dominic in the movement of the Spirit that made
him sell his books to be able to draw that excluded, abandoned person
into the bonds of love and care. Such acts of care for the poor were
the foundational acts that Jesus used to gather disciples to himself,
and to make those bonds be the core reality of the reign of God, the
living heart of the Church. Dominic experienced the Church as the
gathering in of those who, for whatever reason, were needy and lost.
The Church would always be for him the gathering-place of those who
were otherwise excluded. Words, and the books they came out of, would
never work without the gathering in of the outsider and the sinner
by acts of mercy and love.
Learning about the Church in Languedoc
6. The calm, structured stable life of service as a canon of the cathedral
of Osma gave Dominic another view of the Church that would help him
to decide about the institutional form the preaching should take when
he came to live through the defining experience of Church that awaited
him in Languedoc. What was new to Dominic in Languedoc was not the
Church as a canonically structured reality. All of that he knew from
previous experience. The Church that he came to know there was the
Church faced with the excluded. There were so many being excluded.
They were called heretics, which is the Church’s canonical name
for those who are separated, cut off from its communion. How they
had come to be separated, and were continuing to be separated, Dominic
would have to learn by slow stages. But what tore at his heart was
that here was a Church that was not gathering all God’s children
together in love and truth. When Dominic prayed My God, my mercy,
what will become of sinners’, he was praying for the Church.
The Church is the community of salvation in which sinners become saints.
Sinners belong. The Church gathers them to its table, as Jesus did.
If t is not opening its doors to the excluded it is failing as Church.
It might judge that they are excluded by their own fault. But if it
believes in the saving power of Christ, it has to believe that it
has within itself the resources to overcome all sin and to draw people,
willing and unwilling, into the community of salvation. It has a word
of reconciliation that it can never stop speaking. If it does not
itself have faith in the power of that word - if it stops talking
to people who are on the margins, or if its only word for them is
a word of condemnation - it is failing as Church. To borrow from an
image that was common at the time of Dominic, and that was used to
describe his own vocation, it would become a dog that was unable to
bark. A dog without a bark cannot frighten away the wolves; but more
importantly it is useless for rounding up the flock and keeping it
together. In Languedoc Dominic began to learn about how the Church
can fail to gather the straying sheep and give everyone their place
in the flock.
7. The steps taken by Bishop Diego and his Canon Dominic show what
they were coming to learn about the Church. The records of those years
show us an ecclesiology in action. It was a new ecclesiology, or rather
a renewed ecclesiology, because it was something that had been there
from the beginnings of the Church. This ecclesiology is one of the
things that should interest us most about Dominic. It is something
that must be operative in the way we live out and structure our preaching
mission as Dominicans among the present-day Cathars and Cumans and
plain Christians who form the world to which we are sent as preachers.
8. We know that what Diego and Dominic espoused was the vita apostolica,
the way of life that Jesus prescribed for his disciples of the apostolic
age when he sent them out to preach (Matt 10:5-42) and that we find
described in the Acts of the Apostles, especially in passages such
as 2:43-47 and 4:32-37. The feature of it that stood out most strongly
in the choices of Diego and Dominic was its poverty. Poverty is a
profound spiritual value for all Christians. It is a school of that
detachment that opens the human spirit to the possession of God. It
is a school of how Christians are meant to depend on one another for
the needs of this life. As Dominic came to experience poverty, it
was all that - and it was more than that. It was an apostolic strategy,
a way of making the Church and its preaching be more truly apostolic.
When those who preached had nothing - nothing that they would be inclined
to defend and protect as their own - they would be keeping open house.
No one, no publicans or sinners, no heretics, no prostitutes would
be automatically excluded from their table. They were empty-handed
with the empty-handed. Or rather, what they had belonged to everyone.
Dominic would again be seeing the face of the poor, famished woman
of Palencia in the faces of all the other excluded ones he came across
in the Lauragais. The option for poverty and the option for the poor
was something far deeper than a moral choice for Dominic. It was a
revelation to him of the true face of the Church and of preaching.
9. In the vita apostolica Diego and Dominic were also re-discovering
the truth about their own apostolic ministry. They espoused the vita
apostolica, the one as a bishop, the other as a presbyter. The apostolic
community that Jesus gathered was, like Israel of old, structured
under twelve heads, and one of the twelve, Peter, was head of their
group. The first Christian community was gathered together in ‘the
doctrine of the Apostles’. Diego and Dominic never called into
question their role as men who continued that apostolic ministry in
the Church. Others of their day pursued the restoration of the vita
apostolica in a way that gave little or no place to that apostolic
ministry. Lay preachers and some clerics, exasperated with the failures
of their priests and bishops, had gone ahead with their preaching
with little or no reference to the ministerial structures of the Church.
From his days with Bishop Diego, on through his days with Bishop Fulk
in Toulouse, and in his reliance on Popes Innocent and Honorius, Dominic
worked within the apostolically grounded structures of the Church.
Papal legates and papal mandates, Bishops and their authority, canonical
mandate to preach, ordained ministry to absolve and celebrate the
Eucharist - all continue to figure in his project and practice. He
respected not only the structures themselves that claimed their origin
from the Scriptures but the canonical prescriptions that had been
developed in the Church to articulate those structures. He respected
canonical arrangements and conventions, including those that regulated
preaching. But he also saw their limits and ambiguities. There were
things in them that could claim Gospel grounding. But there were other
things in them that were making the excluded feel even more excluded
- and so were hampering the inclusiveness of the Gospel.
10. What Diego and Dominic proceeded to do in Languedoc was not a
frontal assault on these ambiguous canonical structures. In many ways
they continued to work within them. But what they initiated began
to have the effect of little by little freeing preaching from things
that were inhibiting its apostolic energy. A movement was begun which
led in time to the replacement of measures that were proving restrictive
by new canonical arrangements that provided the Church with more expansive
ways of structuring its preaching.
Preaching and Proulihe
11. Barbara has told us about the first and crucial phase of that
process. She has told us about how the sacra praedicatio developed
around Prouilhe. Let me remind you of some of its features and suggest
how they might be taken to embody what I have been saying to you about
Dominic’s ecclesiology.
12. Without abandoning its reference to the still existing papal mandate
that authorised the sacra praedicatio, and with regular reference
to Bishop Fulk of Toulouse, the preaching became less geo-political
and more dedicated to building up local churches in a limited geographical
area. It addressed itself to the towns and villages and countryside
of the Lauragais. This made it more genuinely ecclesial and freed
it from geo-political compromises that would have threatened its inclusiveness.
The sacra praedicatio under the direction of Dominic had, as far as
we know, nothing to do with the crusade of Simon de Montfort.
13. The preaching found a centre that was not dictated by the canonical
geography of the area. It was not in Carcassonne, where Dominic was
at one time a Vicar in spiritualibus for the diocese, nor in Fanjeaux
where Dominic was parish priest, but in Prouilhe. This was a place
of no great ecclesiastical consequence. There was indeed a chapel
there. But what made it the centre of the sacra praedicatio was that
it was the place where Diego and Dominic had gathered a community
of women. These women had been excluded persons - heretics themselves
or from heretical families - who had been drawn into and given a home
in God’s Church. They formed a new Church community. They were,
in one sense, fruit of the preaching, as every Christian community
is. But in another sense they were the preaching. They lived the vita
apostolica in a determined way. They provided a setting and an atmosphere
in which others could live it. The men who went out to speak the word
came back to the home that this community of women was creating in
Prouilhe, and from there they went out again. Those preachers gained
effectiveness from the fact that they could claim identity with that
community of women who formed the base of their preaching. It would
let the heretics know that the life of asceticism and prayer which
they prized in their own leaders was being lived in a stable manner
by Church people. It would let them know too that, when they converted,
there was a home for them in the Church.
14. What was coming into existence at Prouilhe became institutionalised,
gathered into the structures of the Church. It was an institution
that was made up of distinctive groups. There was the community of
religious women. There were lay men and women who sold what they had
and gave themselves and their possessions to Prouilhe. By doing so
they became integrated in the sacra praedicatio. And there were the
clerics. Clerics were men who had made some commitment to service
in the Church, had embraced a way of life and received an education
that would make them suitable candidates for ordained ministry. When
they were actually ordained they could become parish priests or canons
living in some form of community life. The clerics who formed part
of the community gathered in Prouilhe – maybe no more than one
other with Dominic – both ministered to their own community,
and went out from it to preach the Gospel in the surrounding towns,
villages and countryside. With this arrangement the sacra praedicatio
was being given a new face and the a new voice. The clerics, like
the Apostles in Jerusalem, were able to give themselves to ‘the
word and to prayer’. Their word could be an apostolic word for
a number of reasons: firstly because they were part of an apostolic
community, that was, in all its members, living the vita apostolica;
secondly, because they had the theological education that helped them
to know the ‘doctrine of the Apostles’; thirdly because
they had a canonical mandate to preach; and fourthly, because, as
ordained priests, they were able to gather the excluded ones back
into the Church through the reconciling word of the sacrament of Penance
and the celebration of eucharistic communion. The originality - and
it was not really originality because it was a recovery of what was
lived by the first Jerusalem community - was that the spoken word
of preaching and the canonical legitimacy that it enjoyed was being
done from within a full ecclesial community that was made up of men
and women, contemplatives and actives, ordained and lay, clerically
educated and uneducated. Because it was modelled on the Jerusalem
community it held within itself a power to preach the Gospel, not
just to the Lauragais but eventually to the whole wide world.
15. Ecclesiologically speaking, Dominic was discovering what preaching
is. Dominic did not invent preaching; he discovered it. At Prouilhe
he was discovering a truth that parallels a more familiar ecclesiological
truth, one that is centred on the Eucharist. The traditions say that
the Eucharist makes the Church and the Church makes the Eucharist.
Dominic was discovering that preaching makes the Church and the Church
makes preaching. He was discovering that preaching done according
to the Gospel gathers together the scattered children of God into
the Church. He was coming to see the mystery that had already been
at work in his own gathering into the bonds of charity and truth of
the poor woman of Palencia, of the innkeeper of Toulouse, of the Cathars
of Montreal and of the other towns and countryside around Prouilhe.
Dominic was discovering that the Church that preaching makes is an
inclusive Church. And he was, at the same time, discovering that the
Church that makes preaching is the inclusive Church. The Church that
preaches, he was coming to realize, is the whole Church, in all its
members and in all its gifts. It is the Church that is made up of
all those who live according to the Gospel and rejoice and pray together
in the grace of the Holy Spirit. It is the Church that is united in
its belief in the doctrine of the Apostles. It is the Church of women
and men, of the baptised and the ordained, of the monastery and of
the world. It is the Church in which some go out to speak the word
and others stay at home to serve at table. It is the Church that,
in the diversity of its members, does miracles of healing and manifold
works of mercy. What Dominic came to see was a Church that was not
just doing the preaching of the Gospel, but actually was the preaching
of the Gospel. The Church was the sacra praedicatio and the sacra
praedicatio was the Church.
16. Obviously those who went out to speak the word and to engage in
debate with the heretics had a special role in that Church and were
being called preachers in a particular sense. Those who spoke the
word were qualified for their task on several scores. Firstly, they
lived the vita apostolica, and in this they were no different from
their sisters and brothers with whom they lived in Prouilhe. Secondly
they had some theological education, to which they had access because
they were clerics. Thirdly, they had a mandate from Church authorities,
specifically from the papal legate but also from the local bishop,
to speak in the name of the Church. Fourthly, some of them at least
were ordained priests and so were able to absolve sinners sacramentally
and gather them in the celebration of the Eucharist. These qualifications
distinguished them from others who belonged to the sacra praedicatio.
But it did not separate them into a distinct class. They belonged
together with these other men and women in an apostolic fellowship.
Their preaching could be inclusive in the sense of gathering in the
scattered and alienated children of God because the community out
of which they preached was itself inclusive. Theologically speaking,
it was the inclusive relationship between the groups making up the
sacra praedicatio that made their preaching be fully ecclesial.
17. It was also that fellowship in the vita apostolica that gave a
particular quality to the doctrinal component of their preaching.
The preaching of Dominic and his companions had to be a teaching of
doctrine, because one of the things that alienated heretics most from
the Church was wrong thinking about the faith. People’s thinking
about the Gospel was distorted by the false philosophical and religious
presuppositions of Catharism. Dominic was a theologian. He made theological
debate be a plank of his preaching. However, his success as a preacher
was not just a matter of winning theological debates. It was because
he and his companions were actually living the Gospel that his thinking
and teaching about the Gospel converted people. It was accepted in
those days that lay men and women who lived the apostolic life could
preach conversion’. But they were not supposed to preach the
doctrine of faith. Doctrine was to be the business of clerics. It
seems to me that Dominic accepted that distinction of forms of preaching
but broke through the separation of roles that it was thought to require
in those days. His preachers of doctrine would live the apostolic
life and bring the converting power of that way of life to their teaching
words. And sooner or later the preaching of conversion that all the
members of the sacra praedicatio were doing would take on a theological
quality that would make it also be teaching. If there were to be differences
in the balance between call to conversion and call to understanding
in the work of individual preachers, it would be based on something
other than the fact that they were men or women, cleric or lay. It
would be based mostly on their theological education.
From Toulouse to Rome and Back
18. By 1215 Dominic had left Prouilhe for Toulouse. He did so, it
seems, at the behest of the Papal Legate responsible for the preaching
against heretics in the Midi, and of Fulk, the Bishop of Toulouse.
It appears that Fulk wanted Dominic to set up, at the centre of the
diocese, the kind of preaching community that he had developed so
successfully in Prouilhe for the benefit of the Lauragais. Dominic
brought his ecclesiological vision with him and Fulk does not seem
to have put obstacles in his way. He did not force Dominic into the
clerical structures of the capital. He did not, for example, try to
make him a canon of his cathedral. Dominic, in fact, found also in
Toulouse the kind of support he had got from the lay people who had
donated their goods to the praedicatio in Prouilhe. Pierre Seilhan,
gave him a non-ecclesiastical house in a street of the city. The men
preachers were housed there and formed a community around Dominic.
There is evidence that Dominic immediately set about gathering a community
of women in the city, and there are hints that the core of that community
would have been a group of excluded ones - converted prostitutes.
This is perfectly in keeping with the inclusive conception of Church
and of Church preaching that he had come to believe in in Prouilhe.
19. There are historical uncertainties about the next step taken by
Dominic. Within a year of arriving in Toulouse he set out for Rome,
accompanying Bishop Fulk. In Rome he was presented once again, this
time presumably in the company of Bishop Fulk, to the great Pope Innocent
Ill. What were the respective roles of the Pope, of the Bishop and
of Dominic in this meeting? What was the significance of its outcome?
One of the outcomes that historians assure us of is that Dominic went
back to Toulouse and, with the support of Fulk, proceeded to organise
a group of his male companions into a canonical religious community.
When he went back to Rome the following year (1216) he sought approval
of that canonical foundation. Opinions have varied about how that
request was related to any project that Dominic might have originally
presented to Innocent Ill in 1215. They range from the view that Dominic
had gone to Rome by his own choice to ask for confirmation of ‘his
Order of Friars Preachers’, to the view that what he and Fulk
put before the Pope was the full reality of the preaching that Dominic
had been doing in the Lauragais, and was hopefully beginning to do
again in Toulouse. In the first hypothesis the return to Toulouse,
the choice of the Rule of St Augustine, and other canonical arrangements
agreed on, would simply have been the tidying up of details for a
project already agreed in substance. In its most extreme the second
hypothesis would see Dominic going back to Toulouse ‘with a
flea in his ear’, forced to settle for a much more conventional
form of organisation of the preaching than he had proposed.
20. I am not in any position to make a judgement about these competing
historical hypotheses. What I do propose to do, however, is to reflect
theologically, in the light of what I have called the ecclesiology
of Dominic, on the pieces of evidence that are available. It seems
to be not unreasonable to propose that in Toulouse, Dominic would
have continued to act out of the ecclesiological vision of preaching
that he had put into practice in Prouilhe. It seems reasonable to
propose that this ecclesiology would have marked his dealings with
Popes Innocent III and Honorius III. It seems reasonable to interpret
his actions as a religious founder in the light of that ecclesiology.
21. And perhaps this is not entirely irrelevant to the historical
issue. I would venture to suggest that those who write the history
of Dominican origins have never been entirely free of the influence
of ecclesiological presuppositions. If one’s view of the Church
convinces one that certain things cannot be done then no amount of
historical evidence will convince one that Dominic actually wanted
to do them. When a historian assumes, for example, that the Church
is so constituted that only male, ordained clerics can preach, and
if one is convinced that an ‘order’ in the Church can
only mean a homogeneous community of people united under one superior,
then he or she will readily assume that to found an Order of Preachers
is to found a clerical religious order of men. But if one has an ecclesiology
that sees preaching as a function of the whole Church, in which all
the members of God’s prophetic people can have a part, one may
be prepared to interpret what Dominic did somewhat differently. And
if one thinks that an ‘order’ in the Church can be conceived,
not primarily as a juridical structure, but as a communion of different
people in a common task, one may interpret Dominic’s actions
accordingly. My thesis is that in order to interpret Dominic’s
actions in founding the Order one needs to try to enter into the ecclesiological
vision that his activities around Prouilhe seem to manifest. And I
will be then wanting to say that if one wants to make proposals for
how the Order should develop today, one cannot do better than try
to make that ecclesiological vision one’s own and try to make
it live again among Dominicans.
22. What I have been suggesting up to now is that in his Prouilhe
years Dominic was developing an ecclesiological vision that was much
closer to the kind of biblical and patristic ecclesiology that has
been recovered for us by Vatican I than to the post-Reformation ecclesiology
that dominated Catholic thinking until the first half of the twentieth
century. It is in the light of that hypothesis that I want to look
now at some of the evidence of what Dominic actually did from the
time he went to Toulouse, in 1215, (or maybe at the end of 1214 according
to Vicaire) until his death.
Setting Up an Order of Preachers
23. When Dominic and his first companions set up house in Toulouse
they did not do so in an ecclesiastical building but in a ‘secular’
house donated to them by the Seilhan brothers. It is not clear to
me what relationship these brothers had to the diocesan clergy of
Toulouse. Dominic and his companions were certainly not being integrated
in that clergy. They wanted to be something different, They were not
at first attached to any church and seemingly had to go out to the
nearby chapel of Saint Romain for Mass and perhaps even for the canonical
offices. It was after Fulk and Dominic came back from seeing Innocent
Ill in Rome that Dominic was given the church of S. Romain, and Dominic
can be described in the first bull of foundation from Honorius III
as ‘Prior of S. Romain’. Why was one of the first things
that Dominic tried to do when he got to Toulouse the setting up of
a community of women? it is not unreasonable to think that it came
from his conviction that the purest sign of Gospel preaching is that
it reaches out to the excluded and draws them into the communion of
reconciliation and mercy that is the real Church. But was Dominic’s
concern just for the salvation of these women, or had it also something
to do with recognizing they had a role in the preaching? It had been
that for the women in Prouilhe. It would be that for the women in
Bologna, for whom Dominic would want a monastery built before a priory
could be built for the brothers.
24. When Dominic came back from Rome early in 1216 he immediately
undertook the task of forming the brothers who lived with him in the
house of Peter Seilhan into a canonically structured community of
religious life. It is tempting to conclude that this is what he had
gone to Rome to have approved, and that what he had learned there
was simply the terms on which it would be approved. This, however,
attributes to Dominic an ecclesiology that does not seem to square
with the thinking about the Church and its preaching that Dominic
had developed in his Prouilhe days. Can one not reasonably claim that
it was this vision and this understanding of preaching that Dominic
took with him to Rome. His vision was primarily about praedicatio,
and with praedicatores only in function of the way he understood praedicatio.
If I am right about his ecclesiology he must have thought that, while
preaching certainly required the action of men who were clerics and
ordained priests, it required something more than a religious community
of such men in order to be fully a Church preaching. If that is true,
one cannot reduce his charism as founder to creating a clerical religious
order of men.
25. Dominic was a man who respected the structures of apostolic ministry
in the Church. He further respected the need for these structures
to be given canonical shape. Could it not be that what emerged from
his conversations with Pope Innocent was that the praedicatio as envisaged
by Dominic needed to be structured according to the canons. The canons
would require that the different groups who formed the praedicatio
would be organised in appropriate ways. In that hypothesis, what Dominic
did was to go back to Toulouse with the intention of giving canonical
status to the different groups who made up the praedicatio, and also
to the relations that existed between them. We know most about the
way he organised the brothers who gathered around him in Toulouse.
They were clerics, and at least some of them were ordained priests.
But then, or at least soon after, they also included conversi, that
is to say, men who made profession in the community of preachers without
becoming clerics or being ordained. The ordo praedicatorum envisaged
by Dominic began to come into being canonically when these men of
the preaching were organised as a canonical religious order.
Ecclesiology and Legislating for an Order of Preachers
26. Some ecclesiological reflection can help one to understand the
significance of these canonical step that Dominic was taking One of
the issues in any ecclesiology has to deal with is the way the canonical
structures of the Church are related to its deeper reality. The purpose
of the canons, as of any law, is to serve the common good. It is to
support community and communion between people. It is to make all
the members of the community be and be seen to be included. However,
what brings about communion among Christians - the communion that
forms the Church - is not law but the grace of the Holy Spirit. Any
laws that are adopted have to minister to that inner principle of
communion. Within forty years of the death of Dominic, his brother
Thomas, writing out of the movement of Gospel recovery that he had
embraced in becoming a Dominican, would theorize brilliantly about
this whole question of law and the Gospel. He would say that the New
Law of the Gospel is the interior grace of the Holy Spirit, not a
written code:
Now that which is preponderant in the law of the New Testament, and
whereon all its efficacy is based, is the grace of the Holy Ghost,
which is given through faith in Christ. Consequently the New Law is
chiefly the grace itself of the Holy Ghost, which is given to those
who believe in Christ. This is manifestly stated by the Apostle who
says ... (Romans 8:2): “The law of the spirit of life, in Christ
Jesus, hath delivered me from the law of sin and of death.”
Nevertheless the New Law contains certain things that dispose us to
receive the grace of the Holy Ghost, and pertaining to the use of
that grace: such things are of secondary importance, so to speak,
in the New Law; and the faithful need to be instructed concerning
them, both by word and writing, both as to what they should believe
and as to what they should do. Consequently we must say that the New
Law is in the first place a law that is inscribed on our hearts, but
that secondarily it is a written law. (la-llae, q.106, a. 1)
27. The way Dominic acted seems to me to indicate he had a clear understanding
of this relationship between canonical prescriptions and the Gospel
of grace. The grace of the Holy Spirit first began to take canonical
shape in the apostolic community of Jerusalem. There are canons that
have their origin, in one way or another in that apostolic community:
they express the Spirit-given apostolic structure of the Church of
Christ, and as such are always maintained in the Church. At the other
end of the spectrum of legality, there are canons that are particular,
dated, local prescriptions that can and should be easily and frequently
changed. But then there are also canons that lie somewhere between
these two extremes, prescribing things that are more or less close
to the divinely-given foundations of the Church, but that also have
something of the human, the temporal and therefore the changeable
in them. These are the ones in which the grace of the Holy Spirit
has to be discerned most delicately.
28. Dominic can never have wanted to do any canonical re-arrangement
in favour of preaching that would interfere with the divinely-given
bonds of communion that made the Church be the Church of Christ -
the practice and profession of the true faith, proper participation
in the Eucharist, ordained ministry and the interplay of apostolic
authority and obedience. His ecclesiology was, indeed, a bringing
to light of features of the Church that would surprise many of his
contemporaries. But there is no evidence that anything he did called
into question the profound values that the canons were meant to protect.
For all the de-clericalizing of the Church that he did, he never acted
in a way that would undermine the distinction between the baptised
and the ordained. There is no evidence that he ever wanted to preach
a Gospel message that could be set over against a doctrine that had
developed in the Church and was sanctioned by its magisterium; that
he ever opposed a charismatic freedom of prayer to the sacramental
and liturgical prayer of the Church; that he ever opposed a free,
Gospel-centred vagrant way of life to canonically regulated religious
life. And, most significantly of all, he never, to my knowledge, opposed
the preaching of mercy and conversion to the preaching of doctrine.
Nor did he ever oppose a preaching that would draw its power from
Gospel living and Gospel mercy to a preaching that would depend for
its power on canonical mandate.
29. But I believe there is good reason to think that Dominic was coming
to realize that at least some of the current canonical prescriptions
and conventions that were taken to express and support these fundamental
values were unfruitful for preaching. They were turning distinctions
that had to be made into separations and oppositions that were impeding
rather than helping the Church to be a full preaching of the Gospel.
If they were doing that, they could not be thought to belong to the
divine, immutable nature of the Church. There were canons that supported
the status of the ordained that had the effect of leaving little or
no place for the non- ordained; there were procedures that protected
orthodoxy but left little room for Gospel-centred renewal of the faith;
there were regulations that promoted the respectability of clerical
life but enforced clerical privilege at the expense of lay gifts;
there were laws that ensured the dignity of liturgical celebration
but cramped the spirit of prayer; there was a clerical culture that
all but eliminated the space that belongs to women in the Church’s
life and ministry. The conventional ecclesiology of Dominic’s
time might have claimed these canons and conventions expressed things
that belonged to the divine nature of the Church. But Dominic’s
own ecclesiology of preaching was calling many of them into question.
His vision of preaching, and therefore of the Church, was bringing
together the ordained and the non-ordained, those living the clerical
and religious ways of life with secular lay people, women with men.
It was cultivating a life of prayer that could take highly individual
and creative forms while being centred on the Church’s liturgy.
It spoke a word that was building up the communion of the Church by
being both healing word of mercy and orthodox word of doctrine.
30. One can see Dominic setting about finding a way around and through
the canons that were unhelpful to the kind of inclusiveness and ecclesial
fullness that his understanding of preaching required. One can see
him forcing through the adoption of new canons that would allow preaching,
as he and his brothers and sisters were living it, to flourish in
the Church. But one can also see Dominic, I believe, recognising that
his ecclesiology of preaching could not be translated all at once
into appropriate canonical terms. He set about changing what could
be changed and creating an attitude and a process that could, with
time, lead to further changes. I dare to think that he believed that
the grace of the Holy Spirit, the grace of preaching, would sooner
or later put more suitable laws and structures in place. In the life
of the Friars, this Gospel-centred attitude to law would come to be
expressed, for example, in the way the law of dispensation for the
sake of preaching became a normal component of their obedience to
laws. It would also underlie the provision made for the ongoing modification
of their Constitutions at frequently-held General Chapters. I believe
we experience it today in the search for appropriate ways of structuring
juridically the grace-relationship that exists between the different
groups that form the Dominican Family.
31. I believe one can see Dominic’s strategy of gradualness
at work in the way he went about having the Friars established and
given the name ordo praedicatorum. Our historians - Vicaire, Koudelka,
Tugwell - have written fine pages about the way the successive documents
of approval issued by the papal chancery show how, little by little,
Dominic’s vision for the preaching intrudes itself into already-existing
papal formularies, to make them gradually give more and more explicit
canonical approval to his project. His preoccupation was with the
praedicatio and with getting canonical recognition for the people
engaged in it.
32. Although Mandonnet and Vicaire have shown the sense in which the
Bishops were thought, in the 13th century, to constitute the ordo
praedicatorum, it has also been suggested by Simon Tugwell that all
those who were recognised as preachers in the Church could be thought
of in those days as forming an ordo praedicatorum. (1) At the same
time, those who were gathered together in the profession of a particular
form of religious life were understood to form an ordo. What Dominic
did when he came back to Toulouse was to structure the preaching brothers
gathered around him in the house of Peter Seilhan as an order that
could be called, and was ordo praedicatorum – to be translated,
Simon Tugwell suggests, as an order, not as the order of preachers.
Simon Tugwell and others have shown how the first Friars, wanting
to set themselves up as an order that would define itself, not by
a rule but by the ministry of preaching, cut through the established
laws for Canons Regular and Monks, and side-stepped the prescriptions
against the founding of new religious orders emanating from the Fourth
Lateran Council. They made an important contribution to the forging
of the new canonical configuration of ‘Friars’. This was
a configuration that included recognition of the fact that many members
of the community were ordained priests, but that there was also a
place for the non-ordained, for laymen, in the person of the fratres
conversi (in English called lay-brothers). The lay brothers were professed
as full members of the institutions - and so recognised as belonging
to the ordo praedicatorum. It is true that their predominantly practical
gifts and their lack of theological education were taken as reasons
for restricting their full participation in the life of the community
- in the divine office, for example, and in chapters where their voting
rights were restricted. Nor were they expected to preach. But then,
ordained brothers also experienced restrictions. Although members
of the ordo praedicatorum, not all of them were recognised as having
the ‘grace of preaching’; not all of them were actually
sent out to preach. The integral place of the lay brothers in the
preaching project is manifested in the fact that Dominic wanted responsibility
for the material needs of the community to be in their hands, as they
had been put in the hands of the seven ‘deacons’ in Jerusalem.
In spite of the presence of the non-clerical lay brothers within it,
later Canon Law found it convenient to call this gathering of preachers
a ‘clerical order’. However, it has to be always remembered
that, in theological terms, the poverty and unpretentiousness of the
Gospel life-style prescribed for the members was quite the antithesis
of much that ‘clerical’ evoked at the time of Dominic.
Clerical titles and privileges were abolished. All the members were
‘brothers’ to one another.
33. They were also brothers to those others who, following the understanding
of preaching Dominic had developed in Prouilhe, remained their partners
in the work of preaching. If Dominic’s vision was to prevail,
those brother preachers, the Friars, had to remain related to the
other groups who had formed the preaching with them. Concentration
during those years from 1216 to 1221 on regularising the status of
the Friars of the ordo praedicatorum cannot have driven the other
components of his vision for the praedicatio out of the mind of Dominic.
The same canonical sorting out would have to be done for them, in
their organisation as a distinctive group and in their relations with
the other groups who formed the praedicatio.
Friars, Nuns, Laity and Sisters
34. The evidence we have concerning Dominic’s action in favour
of groups other than the Friars is almost exclusively in relation
to the Nuns. I believe it allows one to claim that Dominic created
a new form of monastic life for women. My suggestion is that Dominic’s
preaching-centred ecclesiology is a necessary premise for understanding
the evidence about the part he played in organising the life of the
Nuns. If monasteries of Nuns were an essential component of preaching,
as he wanted it to flourish in the Church, the Nuns’ way of
life would have to reflect their relationship to preaching and to
their preaching brothers, the Friars. That relationship was mutual,
and so it also affected the way the Friars saw themselves.
35. There is evidence that Dominic continued to occupy himself with
the canonical status of Prouilhe, and with the Nuns in Toulouse. Then,
we have that rather forbidding letter that he wrote to the Nuns in
Madrid. (2) The terms of that letter need to be interpreted in the
light of the delightful description that Sister Cecilia has left us
of the relations that Dominic and his brothers had with the Nuns of
San Sisto, and of the account of the founding of the monastery at
Bologna that I have already alluded to. What makes the letter to the
Nuns of Madrid look forbidding is that it is very precisely canonical.
He wants the Nuns to be properly situated in the structures of the
Church. Otherwise they could not contribute to a preaching that was
truly ecclesial. Like the Friars, the Nuns had also to be canonically
respectable. But then, Dominic also wants to bring canonical clarity
to relations between them and their brother preachers. That relationship
was of the theological essence of the lives of both as preachers.
The relationship required the brothers to respect the legitimate autonomy
of the Nuns. They are not to interfere in admissions to the monastery.
That is the business of the prioress. The letter gives one of the
brothers, who seems to be Dominic’s own blood-brother Mannes,
the kind of canonical authority over religious that a monastery normally
had to live under in those days. It extends even to the right to remove
the prioress from office - but only, it is stipulated, “provided
that a majority of the Nuns agree”.
36. We do, then, know something about how Dominic set about organising
the communities of women who belonged to his vision for the praedicatio
into monasteries of Nuns. We have some information about his relationships
with lay men and lay women, but nothing about what he might have done
to give these relationships some canonical structure within the praedicatio.
It is not, however, unreasonable to find evidence of his intentions
in, for example, a statute for the Congregation of St Dominic in Bologna,
that was approved less than 25 years after his death, in 1244, in
which we read: ‘The grace of God’s regard has shone in
your hearts, inspired by the example of St. Dominic and confident
of his help and support you have joined together to devote yourselves
to works of kindness by which the wretchedness of the poor will be
relieved and a service provided for the salvation of souls”.
(3) And there is the even more beautiful Statutes of Our Lady, Arezzo,
approved in 1262: they are centred on the practice of mercy; they
seem to be formulated primarily for men but they do include the prescription:
“Because there is no difference in the sight of God between
men and women in the performance of the works of salvation, we want
both men and women to be received into the saving company”.
(4)
37. Women had been an integral component of the preaching as it developed
around Dominic from his earliest days in Narbonne. Gathering some
of these women together in monastic communities that would have a
permanent relationship with the Friars was one sure way of situating
them canonically within the preaching. And, of course, it gave canonical
shape to that witness of evangelical life, and the eschatological
fullness of it, that was at the very heart of Dominic’s vision
for preaching. There were other women associated with the preaching
who were called to religious consecration but not in its monastic
form. How provision was made for their canonical status within the
preaching is another story. It began with the first Congregations
of Dominican Sisters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and
continues to our own day.
38. The ongoing canonical organisation of the preaching is a story
that we Dominicans need to mediate on. We need to meditate on it theologically,
always starting from what we can learn about Dominic’s theological
vision for preaching. Because it is ecclesiological, that vision will
include canonical expressions and structures. But it will submit those
canonical expression to the same theological scrutiny that led Dominic
to recognise, on the one hand, the need for fidelity to canons that
give form to unchanging realities received from the Apostles, and
on the other hand the need for daring creativity about canons that,
from time to time, need to be abolished, modified or supplemented.
The Preaching Goes On
39. When we look at our Dominican story as it unfolds over the centuries,
we can see times and events in which the theological criterion was
buried under the weight of canonical inflexibility. In spite of being
educated in the school of Thomas, Dominicans have at times acted as
if they believed the grace of the Holy Spirit was co terminus with
established Church law. The Friars have been particularly prone to
this failing. They have had the law on their side and knew how to
manage it. When they drifted into ecclesiologies that were dominated
by clerical concerns, they were in a position to appeal to and when
necessary create laws that would put the right to preach exclusively
in their hands. The would see themselves, in a way their sisters and
brothers were not, to be the Order of Preachers - while all the time
piously telling their sisters and brothers who were not Friars that
they belonged’ to the Order of Preachers. Thank God our history
show how the grace of preaching again and again re-asserted itself
and broke through the stranglehold of the canons - doing it very often,
paradoxically, by recovering and beginning to obey again the original
life-giving canons. Catherine of Siena will be forever cherished among
Dominicans as the best model of someone who opened the eyes of her
sisters and brothers once again to the theological vision of Dominic.
She became a face and a name that stands for all the women —
most of them for so long faceless and nameless - who have been part
of the preaching from Dominic’s day onward. It is painful to
think that, at one point in her life, Catherine had to wish she were
a man in order to be able to model what Dominicans should be. But
she did that modelling, in fact, very much as a woman, and as a lay
woman. She was a Preacher who was neither Friar not Nun. Catherine
has finally been recognised as a theologian, as a Doctor of the Church.
At the heart of her theology was a vision of the Church and for the
Church. It is within that ecclesiological vision that she understood
preaching and did her own preaching. Aniceto Fernandez quotes with
approval his predecessor as Master, Michael Brown, who, in a message
to mark Catherine’s being recognized as a Doctor of the Church,
says that Catherine was the second founder of the Order. In Dominican
iconography she comes to appear along with Dominic in moments that
were thought to be significant in defining what the Order is - moments
such as when it received the Rosary from Mary. Whatever about the
historical accuracy of those portrayals, they express a truth that
is profoundly important for our understanding of the Order of Preachers.
40. The nineteenth century saw another great revival of Dominican
life. The Friars have not been slow or bashful about telling their
part of that story. The Nuns have been more reticent and I am not
aware of much telling on the part of the laity. The Dominican women
who have told their stories best are those who belong to our Dominican
Congregations of Apostolic Life, many of which came into existence
in that century. When the Sisters tell their stones, relations with
the Friars are usually a prominent theme; less so relations with the
Nuns and with the Laity. But, in one way or another all our stories
overlap. Our awareness of this has been facilitated by a term fr.
Hyacinthe Cormier gave official currency to in our language - a term
that can, indeed, be found much farther back in our history - the
term ‘Dominican Family’. The concept of Family has been
very precious in helping us to understand that each of our stories
is part of a common story. It has also helped us to face up to the
fact that as we work, eight centuries after the foundation of Prouilhe,
at bringing our canonical structures into line with the sense we have
of what it is to be preachers, we need also to look again at the canonical
shape of our relations with one another. It was out of his passion
for preaching that Dominic developed a vision of what the Church is
and of what preaching is in that Church. That vision was embodied
in the way he brought together men and women, the ordained and the
non-ordained, religious and seculars in a comprehensive form of preaching.
He worked to give canonical shape to the life of these groups and
to their relations with each other. Our nineteenth and early twentieth
century desires to make men and women live again that glorious pattern
of preaching was to some extent hampered by canon law but, much more
importantly, by the predominant ecciesiology of the times. The Second
Vatican Council has brought about a renewal of ecclesiology and a
corresponding renewal of canon law that should make our task today
more manageable. The ecclesiology of Vatican II is a recovery of the
very Gospel sources about Church life and organisation that inspired
the ecclesiology of Dominic. It is for that reason, and not just because
it is of Vatican II, that we should cherish it.
41. The ecclesiology of Vatican II, and the subsequent direction taken
by church law, have given us grounds for revising the different constitutions
by which we live. Most of us, in our different branches of the Family,
have been comfortable about doing that, and have done it well, because
we knew it is what Dominic did when he worked at translating his vision
for preaching into fresh institutional terms at the beginning of the
thirteenth century. The part of the work that we have been least sure
of and most tentative about is, without doubt, the form to be given
to our relations with one another. Most of us have sensed that the
canonical precedents for relations between the different groups who
form the Dominican Family are inadequate and sometimes stifling in
relation to Dominic’s vision of preaching that we share. It
is the kind of experience Dominic himself had in his dealing with
Popes and Bishops and indeed with his own brothers and sisters. He
worked at it and promised to keep working at it from heaven. What
better place for us to do some hard thinking and prepare some creative
decisions about our relations with one another in the preaching than
here in Prouilhe/Fanjeaux, where the vision of what preaching is came
to Dominic, and where the sacra praedicatio took its first institutional
shape 800 years ago.
___________________________________________________________________
(1) I have found particularly enlightening Simon Tugwell’s
article, “Friars and Canons: The Earliest Dominicans”,
published in Monastic Studies, The Continuity of Tradition, II,
edited by Judith LOADES. Headstart History, Bangor, Gwynedd, 1991.
193-208
(2) English translation of the text to be found in Early Dominicans.
Selected Writings, edited by Simon TUG WELL, in the series Classics
of Western Spirituality, page 394
(3) English translation in Early Dominicans. Selected Writings,
edited by Simon TUGWELL, in the series Classics of Western Spirituality,
page 433
(4) op cit, page 444.
(5) Fr. Fernandez text in To Praise, To Bless, To Preach. Words
of Grace and Truth, Dominican Publications, Dublin. 2004. The text
of fr. Brown he is referring to is in Analecta OP, 1961, 167-178.
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print
a Word document version of this talk. ...Obviously
those who went out to speak the word and to engage in debate with
the heretics had a special role in that Church and were being called
preachers in a particular sense.
_________________
Related Links:
Message
to the Dominican Family
International Commissions Meet to Catch the Fire of Dominic's Vison
Eileen Gannon, OP
The
Coming of the Preachers (opens in Word)
Barbara Beaumont, OP
a provocative look at the founding events of the Order.
click
here for web version
Jubilee Prayer
A new website for the
800th anniversary is now available.
...When we look at our Dominican story as it
unfolds over the centuries, we can see times and events in which
the theological criterion was buried under the weight of canonical
inflexibility.
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