The Dominican Spirit

Extract

The Founder of the Dominican Order was a Spaniard of the thirteenth century, alive to the needs and conditions of his age and steeped in tradition. His spirit survives in his Order, and the friars of to-day still bear the mark of that Spanish modernity and strength.

St. Dominic was a man of his age, vital and ‘modern.’ The representatives of the Church in his day had been overtaken by time and in many ways left behind in an earlier age. The Church was losing ground because the churchmen of the time were unaware of current problems and consequently unable to find the right means to correct the bias of the spiritual force then working strongly among the people. The Cathari and Albigenses were the Communists of the thirteenth century, appealing to a general fraternity and calling for a purification of society with as much zeal and apparent asceticism as the Nazi, Fascist-or Communist. They drew the people away from the Church. By their works you shall know them—works testify to truth. These men of austere life seemed to have the Spirit; the Church with its easy-going monks and ecclesiastics seemed in comparison to have betrayed its ideal. And for the heretic matter was evil; things of the flesh, things made by man for his use and delight, art and ritual, had come from the evil spirit of lies, and truth was not in them.

Then again the towns and cities of Europe were growing. Commerce had moved from the landlords in their rural stability and passed into the hands of the bourgeois traders of the larger towns, and the centres of culture had also been transferred from the great monasteries dotted over the countrysides of Europe to the nascent universities of the cities.