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Posted by on Aug 8, 2013

St. Dominic’s Insight and Evangelization Today

St. Dominic’s Insight and Evangelization Today

St. Dominic

Insights from Conversing with an Innkeeper

Dominic Guzmán (1170-1221), a Spanish priest traveling with his bishop in southern France, spent an entire night talking with an innkeeper who was a believer in Catharism, a dualistic religious cult that originated in the East. He discovered that the man had not really rejected Catholic teachings but rather was ignorant of them. This discovery led to the founding of the Order of Preachers (the Dominicans), a group dedicated to learning theology and other disciplines and communicating the beliefs of the Church to all they met, while living as beggars and travelers on the highways and byways of Europe. Many great theologians and prophets, both men and women, have served the church through the centuries as followers of Dominic and his early companions.

Moving into a Changing World

Dominic’s insight that the Gospel must be taught both with words and through the lives of the ones proclaiming it in the contemporary world with all of its challenges holds as true today as it did some eight hundred years ago. In many ways, we as a community of faith had, until recently, settled into an almost self-satisfied attitude that all of the answers to the questions of faith and  moral behavior had been resolved by theologians of the Middle Ages and/or at the Council of Trent. As Tevye (of “Fiddler on the Roof”)  might have expressed it, “Everyone knows who he is and what God expects him to be!”

Yet such an attitude of self-confident satisfaction with who we are and what we believed did not serve us well. The world’s people continued to discover new truths in science and new understandings of human behaviors and cultures. Industrialization brought changes in family life and opportunities. Education of both boys and girls has become a given in Western societies and increasingly this is also the case in non-industrial societies around the world as well. More strikingly, perhaps, we did not as intelligent inhabitants of this planet learn how to live together in peace, with the common good as our highest concern. Instead, we set about conquering each other, with the nations having the strongest military plundering the regions they had conquered. Somehow the old teachings no longer answered the new questions about God, life, and the reality of evil in the world.

Evangelization Today

Pope Francis and his recent predecessors have called the Church to a new focus on evangelization. The teachings of the Church, including new insights from theology, philosophy, anthropology, psychology and other disciplines, must be presented to the world and lived out joyfully by Christian believers. Pope Francis repeatedly stresses the importance of going out into our communities and meeting people where they live and work. We are to work to alleviate poverty and suffering. We are to serve without judging others whose lives and values differ from ours. We are to be true to the traditions of our community, but recognize that those traditions may need to be presented in different words and explained using different images. Some of those traditions may need to be stretched so they express the lived experience of a new generation of believers. This is the age of the Holy Spirit in salvation history and we must recognize that God is so much bigger and more amazingly wonderful than we could ever imagine, that no human formulation could ever totally express the full reality of who God is.

Like the times of Dominic Guzmán, there is a great need in today’s world for people of faith to learn about God, about our Christian beliefs and traditions, and about the newly emerging insights of our living faith community. The days when the catechism lessons of childhood sufficed for an adult life of faith are long since gone, if they ever truly existed. We are all called to continue to learn, to study Scripture, to reflect on God’s active presence in our lives, and to share what we have learned with others. And we do this not just at Church or in catechism classes, but also in our daily activities on the highways and byways of our lives. The People of God are once again called to be proclaimers of the loving presence and activity of our God.

And that innkeeper with whom Dominic spoke all night? He returned to the Catholic faith once he understood what the community really believed.

St. Dominic, Pray for us!

Image: St. Dominic by Fra Angelico, Side panel of the Altarpiece in Perugia

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Posted by on Apr 29, 2009

St. Dominic’s Insight and Evangelization Today

St. Catherine of Siena – April 29

st-catherine-of-siena

April 29 is the feast of St. Catherine of Siena, O.P. Catherine Benincasa was born in 1347 in Siena, Italy. She was the 25th and final child born to her parents. Her father was a wool dyer and her mother was mistress of a large and active household. (Catherine was actually a twin, but her sister died shortly after birth.)

As a girl, when asked who my patron saint was, the only St. Catherine I knew at the time was Catherine of Siena. So I decided to take her as my patroness. That was fine with my mother, since I hadn’t been particularly named with a saint in mind! I didn’t know much about her, but she seemed like a strong, intelligent, interesting woman, so I stuck with her.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned much more about her and have become much more impressed with her spunk, her intelligence, her courage and her great faith. She was a woman who took matters into her own hands at a time when parents, and particularly fathers of families, made life-determining choices for their children. She cut her hair rather than get married. She accepted her parents’ decree that she should become a servant of the family if she wouldn’t behave as a daughter was expected to behave. She spent many years devoted to prayer alone in a small room at home. She was a mystic who allowed the love of God to flow forth through her to those in the world around her. She ventured out into a turbulent world, becoming an advisor to popes and other leaders of church and state. She cared for plague victims and organized others to do so as well. For most of her life she couldn’t read or write, but that didn’t stop her. She dictated and sent letters to people great and small. She recorded her insights into the spiritual life in works that are read to this day. Her influence has lasted far beyond her short 33 years.

In 1970, she became one of the first two women honored as Doctor of the Church for her writings.

I asked several people who are familiar with the work of St. Catherine of Siena to share a short idea or two with us about her. These are the responses I received, in order received.

From Susan T. Mahan, Ph.D.
I like the fact that Catherine did not seek to be the center of attention even though she had an exceptional spiritual life. When her family was angry at her for refusing to marry and isolated her; then made her work as a servant and wouldn’t let her out of the house, she totally accepted it and prayed her way through the day. She was not resentful but saw the gift in her circumstances. She also followed her inner discernment as to what the Lord wanted for her and trusted Him. She did not bend to what others expected – her family, her social class, even the Pope.

From Michael Fones, O.P.
What I really admire about Catherine was her ability to cross boundaries and categories that normally would have been off limits to women – and often, even men. She traveled extensively, at a time when travel was unusual and dangerous. Because of her holiness, she was brought in to mediate between factions at odds with one another. She was, as Jesus said of those who are born from above, like the wind; you couldn’t tell where she came from or where she was going. I find her fascinating because of her single-minded devotion to the Blessed Trinity, and the intense personal relationship she had with God, which is so beautifully expressed in her masterpiece, the Dialogue.

From Sr. Barbara Long, O.P.
I think the most interesting things for me are all of her efforts in striving to bring peace to the Church and the warring city states of Italy. At the end of her life, she thought that she was a failure, and yet look what a legacy she has left us.

In these our turbulent times, the example of St. Catherine of Siena is one upon which we should all draw.

Image by Bro. Robert Lentz, OFM

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