Why do I love Saint Dominic?

[Geremia]

Happy feast of St. Dominic! 🥳 🎉

Fr. Roger-Thomas Calmel, O.P. (✝1975), the Fanjeaux Dominican teaching sisters' "religious assistant for a congregation of women" (a role Pope Pius XII created in the '50s; cf. p. 97n94 of Rupture ou fidélité), gave 8 answers to the question "Pourquoi j'aime saint Dominique?" (1952):

Why do I love Saint Dominic?
by Father Roger-Thomas Calmel (1914-1975)

Around 1952, sixteen years after receiving the habit of Saint Dominic, Father Calmel explained the reasons why he loved the founder of the Order of Friars Preachers:

• First, because he is our father. Even if we had ten thousand teachers," says St. Paul, "we have only one father, and it is he who has begotten us in Christ through the Gospel. Ever since I thought of entering his order (ever since he made me think of entering it) I have never been able to pronounce his name except with great tenderness and respect; he is the father, he who first loved us. How beautiful I've always found that daily prayer, shivering with sobs and hope:
  Sta coram Summo Judice
  Pro tuo cœtu pauperum¹...
  
  
• I love Saint Dominic because he is a very holy priest of Jesus Christ. He always thought of being a priest. And not only was he an irreproachable priest (which doesn't exactly mean holiness), but he was a priest who was always totally taken by the Lord Jesus. He would say mass weeping, and he couldn't see the cities of men on his travels, from the top of some hill, without weeping. He had understood, and at what dizzying depth, those words of the Eucharist that sum up the whole life of the priest, his entire belonging to the Eucharistic heart of Jesus and to his Mystical Body, which he forms with sinners of all kinds: "This is the chalice of my blood (...) poured out for you and for the human multitude: drink from it, all of you".
  
  
• And this extremely holy priest that you were (that you are for eternity), O our Father, had a very fine, very deep, very sure understanding of the gentle Virgin Mary. The hymns that punctuated your peregrinations were the Salve Regina and the Ave maris Stella. And the order of which you are the father would become the order of the Rosary and Angelico's Madonnas.
  
  
• I love Saint Dominic because his purity was not only total, but diffusive, desired by the poor and feared by the devils. Not only was he a virgin, but among the saints who chose virginity in order to be more exclusively devoted to their Lord, he is undoubtedly one of the very few who understood women so well, and who behaved with them with such simple freedom. This friendship of Jesus for Martha and Mary, which the beloved disciple evokes in passages of such gentle light, cannot be doubted to have been alive in the heart of our Father. We have all read with rapture the scene of the cup, the spoons of boxwood, the heartbreaking scene of the recluse devoured by worms, who pulls one out of her ravaged chest to give it to our father. And our father places an Adamantine star in her hand, restoring the integrity of her flesh. We know from the testimony of witnesses in Bologna and Toulouse how holy women watched over his temporal life as a poor ascetic. We know how sternly the Blessed Virgin scolded this prudish, circumspect devotee, who was scandalized by the young brothers who were embarking on preaching and apostolic journeys: "Do you think," said the Blessed Virgin herself, "that I can't look after them? We know that among the founders of orders, he was one of the very few who founded the order of sisters before that of fathers. This priest, a great contemplative, tender, pitiful and pure, understood women marvelously, and that's why the converted woman, the friend of the Blessed Virgin, St. Mary Magdalene, spontaneously became the protector of his order.
  
  
• I love our father, because he had a passion for evangelical doctrine and founded an order to bring it to mankind. And that goes hand in hand with his priesthood. His zeal for souls is admirably complete and balanced. Not only a testimony of poverty by detachment from the earth and offering himself to the love that is not loved, like St. Francis of Assisi, but with that, at the same time, the feeling that man - whatever he does - cannot do without ideas and doctrine, that, to save men and draw them to the holy Church, example, however indispensable, will not suffice. As Jesus said: "Go, teach all nations, instruct them. In this respect, Saint Dominic is the living image of the apostles and the Doctor of the Gentiles. "Pugiles fidei et vera mundi lumina ²", declared Pope Honorius, using the very words of the apostles' liturgy, on the day he approved the friar preachers.
  
  
• And it was because his zeal for souls was complete and balanced that our father, far from losing interest in the things of the city, wanted a Christian city. You wouldn't have to know that you belonged to a city - whatever you did - to be surprised by this aspect of our father's life, or to fail to understand his plea during the battle of Muret. But this preoccupation with the temporal city was as pure as it can be in the heart of a priest, and it would be inappropriate to use the words "skill" and "diplomacy" even to dismiss them.
  
  
• I love our father because he was free and founded a free order. He was free like those led by the Spirit. He conceived with extreme rigor the end of his order and the means: preaching to all, which flows from contemplation - monastic asceticism, study and liturgy creating the climate for this contemplation, but having established this, he didn't write a rule; at least he only wrote a few fragments. He established a very self-confident, but by no means meticulous, clerical religion. Here are just a few examples of the kind of freedom that the orders of modern times have made us lose sight of (but not the taste for, rest assured, O venerable founders of the classical centuries!) Remember that Saint Dominic used to say: "Grain piled up rots, but scattered it bears fruit. And he understood how to disperse grain for the salvation of souls. And when a brother complained of not being ready enough: "Go anyway," he would say, "twice a day I'll remember you before the Lord. It was this taste for freedom - as much as the sense of preaching that the poor should proclaim the poor Christ - that made him forbid (and how vehemently!) the fitting-out of convents as a facility. Remember the Bologna chapter and its imprecations on his deathbed. It's hardly surprising, then, that the Order - insofar as it was alive and kicking - had so many wanderers in its early days, and afterwards. It took the 17th century and a reformer as short-sighted as Father Michaëlis³ to turn preachers into a kind of Carthusian monks who preach with fear; to turn them into contemplatives, he turned them into casaniers.
  
  
• And now, Blessed Father, who sees what your sons have made of your Order - who knows the times of misery in which we stumble (your 13th century was a game compared to the scandals, errors and sufferings of ours) - who also sees our desire to be your children, oh! pray for your sons and daughters. Grant them to love Jesus Christ so much that they may be oppressed by the salvation of souls through the mercy of truth - that they may have, like you, that magnetic purity - that nobility - that royal freedom of children and apostles. Intercede also for this very poor son who dedicates these lines to you. May the sweet, illuminating and devouring fire that makes apostles finally penetrate his heart so that his life may be given in joy for his brothers and sisters.

Notes

• Stand before the Sovereign Judge, interceding for your society of the poor.
• Combatants of the faith and true lights of the world (—Ed. note).
• Sébastien Michaëlis, born around 1543, died May 5, 1618, Dominican father and founder of the Occitan congregation of strict observance (—Ed. note).

[Geremia]