This is an excerpt from a homily given at St. Mary’s Church Jan. 21 as part of the closing celebration for the 800th anniversary of the Dominicans.
Dear brother priests, Sisters, and friends in Christ:
Here you are, beloved Dominicans, in your major canonical divisions:
• the priests who minister at St. Mary’s Parish, St. Joseph’s Parish and in health care;
• the nuns from Queen of Peace Monastery who are the beating heart of the life of our local Church;
• the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia and the Nashville Dominicans, who teach at three different Catholic schools and Catholic Pacific and Corpus Christi College;
• Sr. Anne Frances, of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Province; and
• the lay Dominicans of Mysteria Lucis, who bear witness that Dominican spirituality is putting down deep roots in the soil of the Archdiocese of Vancouver.
As you can see, the Dominicans are everywhere in our Church: from the cloister, to the confessional to the classroom. How grateful we all are to the Order founded by “holy father Dominic” for the many graces he has brought to the Church of Vancouver through his disciples.
At the heart of the Order of Preachers is “communicating the Word of God, by an evangelization that is born of the contemplative life, is nourished by a constant dialogue between reason and faith, and is geared to creating an ever greater fraternal communion.”
Some people think it is impossible to unite the contemplative and active lives, because each of these lives is so engrossing. Supposedly, the life of prayer claims all the attention of a person; likewise for an active person his or her activity claims all their attention. When Dominic founded the Friars Preachers, some people said it was impossible to have a religious Order that combined both features.
They knew only two kinds of Order. There were the contemplative Benedictines, Cistercians, Carthusians, Premonstratentians, and so forth. They led lives of intense prayer.
The active Orders were strictly active, the Knights Templars, Knights of St. John, Teutonic Knights, and Orders taking care of pilgrims and the sick, running inns & hospitals.
St. Dominic founded a new kind of Order, one that pursued an intense life of prayer and yet embraced apostolic activity. He personally demonstrated that it is possible to be a contemplative of the highest type and also a zealous apostle.
But these two lives can be united only when the apostle gets his priorities right. That means giving primacy to contemplation. This is how Jesus did it. Before sending out his disciples two by two, he called them: to “be” with him.
In our busy world, we so often forget the primacy of the contemplation of God – of seeing, even sometimes feeling, his presence in all things.
We must all, then, first be “disciples,” that is, “listeners to and learners from” the Lord himself, before we can we become his “apostles”; that is, ones whom he send out entrusted with his mission of evangelization.
This is simply a rephrasing of Dominic’s injunction to his followers: “First contemplate, then teach.” Without a strong union with God, “preaching might seem completely perfect, quite reasonable and even admirable, but it will not touch the heart, which is what has to change.”
We find a master of this correct setting of priorities in St. Dominic. It was said of him that he spoke “only of God or to God.” While still a young canon at Osma, in Spain, he shone, the accounts go, “as a bright ray of sunshine, in humbleness of heart the least, in holiness the first.” When he set out with his bishop to see the world, Dominic was appalled by the catechetical, spiritual and moral impoverishment of many of the people he encountered.
So he gathered followers to join his passion of preaching Jesus Christ and the message of salvation at the heart of the Gospel. He followed St. Paul’s teaching in writing to the Romans that “faith comes from hearing the message.”
Dominic’s great gift was to inspire and enable other people to come into a living relationship with Jesus Christ in his Body, the Church.
In 1217, before abruptly dispersing his little band of followers two by two all over Europe, Dominic spoke to them on the motives and methods of preaching and urged them to unremitting prayer and the study of sacred doctrine. If contemplative prayer was primary, study was also necessary.
In this emphasis, Dominic gives us a good example. If we are to help people understand why the Gospel is truly Good News, freeing and nourishing the deepest wells of the human spirit, it is not enough just to be fervent. As Pope Benedict liked to remind us, we must be able to communicate in such a way that the beauty of the Christian truth may be better understood and faith may be truly nourished, reinforced and also defended. Or, in Pope Francis’ words to the General Chapter of the Order of Preachers, “The preacher contemplates the Word and also contemplates the people, who are waiting to be understood.”
