Dominican Laity

Until recent times, by a pious belief going back to the fourteenth century, St. Dominic was credited with organizing a Third Order of Laity, as if instinctively it seemed desirable to include the whole People of God in his apostolic intuition. In the last century Lacordaire wrote in his Life of St. Dominic (chap. XVI):

"The militia of Jesus Christ was the third Order instituted by St. Dominic, or rather, the third branch of a single Order, embracing in its wide scope men and women religious and the laity .... Dominic brought religious life to the family hearth, to the marriage bed. The world was filled with young girls, widows, married people, men in every walk of life, who publicly wore the insignia of a religious Order and bound themselves to its practices in the privacy of their homes."

The description would be valid for the end of the thirteenth century, the period to which historians ascribe groups of lay people who truly could be called Dominicans.

Actually, the Order of Preachers was linked with the laity from its very inception, in a quite natural way, by reason of its establishment in cities. It always made room for them. We find many instances of this in accounts of the early days of the Order: at Cologne, for example, where Brother Henry was Prior (The Beginnings, 79 85), or again at Bologna in the neighborhood of the monastery of St. Agnes. Jordan in one of his letters greets Diana d'Andalo "and the ladies and friends of the community". 16

Pursuing its apostolic thrust, the Order of Preachers was bound to encounter the evangelical movement of the laity who, in Italy, had organized themselves into an Order of Penance. These lay groups, divided into local fraternities, addressed their spiritual needs to the new, contemporary mendicant orders. According to their affinities and the orientation of their spirituality, members would wear a gray mantle if associated with the Friars Minor, black if they frequented the Dominicans.

It was not until 1285 that the Master General of the Preachers, Munio of Zamora, invited the "black" penitents to place themselves under his jurisdiction. They were given a Rule and a Dominican director, and confraternities had their own priors. "The Order wished to take the responsibility for this lay branch so as to realize the great hope of lay movements, heretofore always disappointed: evangelical proselytism."17

With this in view the penitents, who up until then, through humility and as an example, had followed the life style of repentant sinners and had devoted themselves to works of charity, were to bear witness to a love of truth proper to the Order of Preachers in the thirteenth century. Munio of Zamora's rule makes this clear in unequivocal terms: "Let them excel in virtue and guard their reputation. Let them in no way leave themselves open to suspicion of heresy, but on the contrary be true sons of St. Dominic in the Lord, filled to the utmost with strong and ardent zeal for Catholic truth, in ways in keeping with their own life."18

The laity were here being given an ecclesiastical mission, were being placed at the service of the preaching of truth "in accordance with their own life". Their activities would vary greatly through the centuries; they would be called confraternities, militia or societies. Some communities would live under a rule without being bound to enclosure. Such would be the case with the mystical mantellata, Catherine Benincasa. The Third Order Regulars would gradually learn how to share in the Dominican grace of preaching through works of charity and also, in a privileged way, through teaching.

We have no difficulty in admitting that, in his lifetime, Dominic could not have foreseen all the forms of life that would flow from his intuition in the founding of the Order of Preachers. No ancestor can imagine his progeny. Dominic's friend Gregory IX, in the Bull of Canonization for Dominic, indeed foresaw that like the Orders of Citeaux and Flora under St. Bernard, the Friars Minor and the Preachers would draw after them "legions of brethren". Preaching the gospel of Christ, wholly devoted to the Word of God, "Dominic engendered a great number of sons" (1 Cor 4:15).'9

The fruitfulness of the grace of preaching gave birth to innumerable branches through the course of history, all of them dependent, by reason of their service to the apostolic mission, upon the center, the Church. With his brothers, his nuns, and the laity, the Dominican family, whose name is declined in the plural, responds to the broad invitation of the Apostle: "We ought to support such men, that we may be fellow workers in the truth" (1 Jn 8).

(Source : Bedouelle, Guy. Saint Dominic. The Grace of the Word. Ignatius. 1987.)