Dominican Order

• 1. Introduction

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  The Dominican Order, formally the Order of Preachers, counted 5,369 friars in 2024, and 4,073 of them were priests. Members add the letters OP after their names. A Castilian priest named Dominic de Guzmán founded the order in France in the early thirteenth century, and Pope Honorius III approved it on the 22nd of December 1216 with the bull Religiosam vitam. The founding documents gave it two purposes: preaching, and the salvation of souls.

  That modest sounding mission raises several questions. How did a small community of preachers become a force in medieval universities, papal politics and distant mission fields? Why does an order built on persuasion carry the reputation of the Inquisition in the popular memory? And what keeps an institution alive after reformations and revolutions have swept away whole provinces? The answers start with a hungry town in Spain and a wedding negotiation that went somewhere unexpected.

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• 2. Among the Cathars

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  A famine struck Palencia, in Spain, while Dominic was studying there. He sold his beloved books and other belongings to help his neighbours. Scripture had been the foundation of his spiritual life since adolescence. He was ordained at the monastery of Santa María de La Vid, and Bishop Martin Bazan and Prior Diego de Acebo then appointed him to the cathedral chapter of Osma.

  In 1203, Dominic accompanied Diego de Acebo, by then Bishop of Osma, on a diplomatic errand to Denmark. They were to arrange a marriage between the son of King Alfonso VIII of Castile and a niece of King Valdemar II of Denmark. At that time, the south of France was the stronghold of the Cathar movement.

  The Cathars, also called Albigensians because of their base around Albi, were viewed by the Church as a heretical neo-gnostic sect. They taught that matter was evil and only spirit was good. That belief struck at the incarnation, a central idea in Catholic theology. Pope Innocent III launched the Albigensian Crusade in 1209 to wipe out Catharism in Languedoc. It dragged on for twenty years, until 1229.

  Dominic saw a different path. He wanted to win Cathars back through preaching and teaching, beginning near Toulouse, because the crusading armies had not shaken the Albigensians' convictions. Diego added a sharp observation. Church representatives travelled with an offensive amount of pomp and ceremony, while the Cathars generally lived ascetic lives. He urged the regional papal legates to adopt a reformed apostolic life. The legates agreed, on one condition: they needed a strong leader who could meet the Albigensians on their own ground.

  In 1206, Dominic placed several Albigensian women he had reconciled to the Church in a convent at Prouille, near Toulouse. This house became the foundation of the Dominican nuns, which makes them older than the Dominican friars. Diego also approved a monastery there for girls whom poor parents had entrusted to the Albigensians. Prouille later became Dominic's headquarters for the mission. After two years in the field, Diego died while travelling back to Spain.

  Dominic kept preaching for ten years and converted many people. The results still fell short of what he had hoped. One assessment quoted in the source says that after all of it, including the Crusade, "the population still remained at heart Albigensian." The gap between changed appearances and changed convictions called for something harder than good manners: preachers who truly understood the faith they were defending.

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• 3. Schools Before Pulpits

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  In 1214, Dominic gathered a religious community in Toulouse and gave it the rule of Saint Augustine, along with statutes that included the Primitive Constitution. By July 1215, with the approval of Bishop Foulques of Toulouse, he was organizing his followers into a settled institutional life. His successor Jordan of Saxony explained the choice of Augustine in the Libellus de principiis: the rule suited the salvation of souls through preaching. It also made the friars canons regular rather than monks. They could share a common life and minister to others while remaining individually poor. Henri-Dominique Lacordaire later noticed that the statutes resembled those of the Premonstratensians, which suggests Dominic borrowed from the reform of Prémontré.

  Papal paperwork followed. Honorius III issued Nos attendentes alongside Religiosam vitam. On the 21st of January 1217, he issued Gratiarum omnium, which recognised Dominic's followers as an order devoted to study. It also gave them a universal authority to preach, a power that had previously depended on the permission of local bishops.

  For Dominic, study was not decoration. In his thinking, no man could preach what he could not understand. On the 15th of August 1217, he sent seven followers to the university center of Paris. They set up a priory dedicated to study and preaching, the Convent of St. Jacques, which grew into the order's first studium generale. Similar houses followed in Bologna in 1218, in Palencia and Montpellier in 1220, and in Oxford just before Dominic died in 1221. The women of the order also ran schools for the children of local gentry.

  In May 1220, the first General Chapter, held at Bologna, required every new priory to keep its own studium conventuale. That decision built the habit of running schools into the order's structure. Meanwhile, Honorius III had given Dominic the convent of San Sisto Vecchio in Rome around 1218. In 1219, the pope invited the friars to live at the ancient basilica of Santa Sabina, and they had moved in by early 1220. The property was formally transferred to the order on the 5th of June 1222. In 1265, Thomas Aquinas turned the studium there into the order's first studium provinciale, and part of its curriculum moved in 1288 to Santa Maria sopra Minerva.

  By the thirteenth century, the order's reach covered nearly every rung of Christian society. Its doctors produced monumental works across many fields of knowledge, with Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas among the most important. Its members became popes, cardinals, bishops, legates, confessors of princes and ambassadors. Some served as paciarii, who enforced peace decrees issued by popes or councils.

  The scholar J. A. Weisheipl stressed how unbroken the Aquinas tradition has been inside the order. He wrote that "Thomism was always alive in the Dominican Order, small as it was after the ravages of the Reformation, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic occupation." General Chapters repeatedly required Dominicans to teach the doctrine of Aquinas in both philosophy and theology.

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• 4. Inquisitors and Mystics

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  Pope Gregory IX gave the Dominicans the duty of carrying out the Inquisition. In 1252, Pope Innocent IV issued the bull Ad extirpanda, which authorised them to use torture under prescribed circumstances. The source notes that torture was seen not as punishment but as a way of drawing out the truth. The order's beginnings in the fight against heresy shaped its later reputation. Tomás de Torquemada, the first Grand Inquisitor of Spain, came from its ranks. So did Bernard Gui, an inquisitor of the Cathars, and Nicholas Eymerich, Inquisitor General of the Crown of Aragon.

  The record is not one-sided. Giordano Bruno, a philosopher and astronomer who was a Dominican, was condemned as a heretic and burned in Rome. Tommaso Campanella was denounced by the Inquisition. Girolamo Savonarola, who ruled Florence for a time after the Medici were overthrown, was also burned by the Inquisition.

  As the order grew, a quieter current rose within it. Less stress on doctrinal activity favoured a contemplative life, especially in Germany and Italy. The names attached to this movement include Meister Eckhart, Heinrich Suso, Johannes Tauler and Catherine of Siena. German mysticism has sometimes been called Dominican mysticism. It prepared the way for reforms led by Raymond of Capua.

  Albertus Magnus supplied much of the intellectual backbone. Drawing on Dionysius the Areopagite, he held that positive knowledge of God is possible but obscure. It is therefore easier to say what God is not than what God is. He illustrated the logic with an example: "It is not contradictory to say that someone is white-toothed and not white." Contemplation, in his view, leaves a person knowing that God is without knowing what God is.

  Mysticism in the Rhineland rose out of political, social and religious crises, among them the Black Death. In Europe, women of the order, including Mechthild of Magdeburg, Christine of Stommeln, Margaret Ebner and Elsbet Stagl, won reputations for mystical experiences. Meister Eckhart taught that people should be mindful of the great nobility God has given the soul.

  English Dominicans took another road. By 1300, enthusiasm for preaching and conversion had faded, and mysticism drew the best minds. Where continental mystics prized ecstatic union, the English focused on imitating the moral life of Christ. They neither expected nor sought the stigmata. Their mysticism was a journey of faith, and it could be pursued without visions or voices.

  Humbert of Romans, master general from 1254 to 1263, gave that outlook its voice. Young Dominicans, he advised, should be taught "not to be eager to see visions or work miracles, since these avail little to salvation." The English took the advice to heart. The nuns of Dartford Priory then drew on all of these inheritances at once.

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• 5. The Cloistered Women

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  By 1227, Dominic and the early friars had founded women's houses at Prouille and elsewhere. They proved so popular that some friars worried about the time and money those houses demanded. Even so, they spread across Europe. Germany had 74 Dominican women's houses, Italy 42, France 9, Spain 8, Bohemia 6, and Hungary and Poland 3 each. Many German houses had begun as Beguine communities and became Dominican after the traveling preachers instructed them. The order counted 157 nunneries by 1358. After that year the number dropped sharply because of the Black Death.

  Wealthy patrons funded other convents as retreats for upper-class women. Countess Margaret of Flanders founded the monastery of Lille. Val-Duchesse at Oudergem, near Brussels, was built in 1262 with the fortune of Adelaide of Burgundy, Duchess of Brabant.

  Unlike the men's houses, the women's houses were enclosed. The sisters chanted the Divine Office and kept all the monastic observances, under the authority of the general and provincial chapters. Friars served as their confessors, priests, teachers and mentors. A woman could be professed at 13. The Constitutions of Montargis Priory, from 1250, required nuns to promise obedience to God, the Blessed Virgin and their prioress until death. Their clothing was a white tunic and scapular, a leather belt, a black mantle and a black veil. Candidates were asked whether they were married women who had simply separated from their husbands, and their intellect was tested. Silence ruled the prayer spaces, the cloister, the dormitory and the refectory unless the prioress allowed otherwise.

  Learning mattered. In the Strassburg monastery of Saint Margaret, some nuns could talk fluently in Latin. Margarette Reglerin, the daughter of a wealthy Nuremberg family, was dismissed from a convent because she lacked either the ability or the will to learn.

  At Dartford Priory in England, the first nuns came from the priory of Poissy in France. On the eve of the Dissolution, Prioress Jane Vane wrote to Cromwell on behalf of a postulant who was not formally professed, saying that she was professed in her heart and in the eyes of God. Strict discipline and plain living marked Dartford throughout its existence.

  The Reformation forced many Dominican nunneries to close. St Ursula's in Augsburg survived and founded many new houses. In the seventeenth century, bishops often asked such convents to teach girls and visit the sick. After Napoleon closed many European convents, King Louis I of Bavaria restored the women's orders in 1828 on the condition that they take on useful work for the state, usually teaching or nursing. In 1877, Bishop Ricards of South Africa asked Augsburg for nuns to start a teaching mission in King Williamstown. That mission produced the Dominican Sisters of Oakford in 1881, the Dominican Missionary Sisters of Zimbabwe in 1890 and the Dominican Sisters of Newcastle in 1891.

  Today 24,600 sisters belong to 150 Dominican congregations in 109 countries, all affiliated to Dominican Sisters International. Their roots lie both in the cloistered nuns and in lay tertiary women such as the Mantellates of Siena, to whom Catherine of Siena belonged. The contemplative nuns celebrated their 800th anniversary in 2006, and some monasteries fund themselves by making vestments or baking communion wafers. Henri Matisse was so moved by the care he received from Dominican sisters that he helped design and decorate their chapel in Vence, France.

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• 6. Roads Beyond Europe

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  Dominican friars were already preaching on the Volga Steppes by 1225, the year after Batu established the Kipchak Khanate. In 1240, Pope Gregory IX sent more of them to Persia and Armenia. The Pax Mongolica of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had linked large parts of Europe and Asia, and western missionaries used it to travel east.

  Jordanus de Severac became the most famous of them. He went first to Persia, then in 1321 to India with a companion, Nicolas of Pistoia. His observations survive in two letters to the friars of Armenia and in a book called Mirabilia, translated as Wonders of the East.

  Ricold of Monte Croce worked in Syria and Persia. His journeys took him from Acre to Tabriz and on to Baghdad. There, Dominican fathers already in the city welcomed him, and together they argued with the Nestorians. Dominicans and Franciscans persisted against the growing strength of Islam in the region. Timur's death in 1405 brought the expulsion of every Christian missionary.

  The Reformation cost the order six or seven provinces and several hundred convents. The discovery of the New World opened a fresh field in return. Bartolomé de Las Casas, a settler there, was shaken by the torture and genocide the Spanish colonists inflicted on Native Americans. He became famous for defending their rights, and he described their cultures, especially in the Caribbean, with care. Francisco de Vitoria of the School of Salamanca became renowned for his work in international law. In 1538, the Universidad Santo Tomas de Aquino was established in Santo Domingo, and the source calls it the first university of the New World.

  Gaspar da Cruz, who lived from about 1520 to 1570, worked across the Portuguese empire in Asia. He was probably the first Christian missionary to preach in Cambodia, though without success. A stint in Guangzhou in 1556 was also unsuccessful. Back in Portugal, he became the first European to publish a book devoted entirely to China, in 1569 or 1570.

  The Colegio de San Juan de Letran in Intramuros, Manila, dates to 1620. By the 1850s, the Dominicans had half a million followers in the Philippines. They also ran well-established missions in the Chinese province of Fujian and in Tonkin, Vietnam, where they performed thousands of baptisms every year.

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• 7. Ruin and Revival

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  Manuel Joseph de Medrano, a preacher general and official chronicler of the order, published a history of the Spanish province in Madrid in 1727. It traced Dominican foundations and prominent members from Dominic's death through the end of the thirteenth century, and it was dedicated to the Master General Tomás Ripoll. A second volume followed in 1731, printed in Madrid by Geronimo Roxo. Medrano also defended the sanctity and prophetic mission of Savonarola in his life of Saint Agnes of Montepulciano. A jurist named Jayme Ardanaz y Centellas discussed that defense in a dialogue, around 1730, answering criticisms from the Benedictine scholar Benito Jerónimo Feijóo.

  The eighteenth century brought many reform attempts and a falling number of devotees. The French Revolution ruined the order in France, and further crises damaged or destroyed many provinces. Even so, the number of Preachers seems never to have dropped below 3,500 in the early nineteenth century. In 1876 the count was 3,748, though 500 of those men had been expelled from their convents and were working in parishes. By 1910 it reached 4,472. In 2013 there were 6,058 friars, including 4,470 priests.

  France led the revival, thanks largely to the orator Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire, who took the habit in Rome in 1839. The province of France was canonically erected in 1850. It later spun off the province of Lyon, called Occitania, in 1862, Toulouse in 1869 and Canada in 1909. Père Vincent Jandel, from the French revival, served as master general from 1850 to 1872, the longest stretch of any in that century. Lacordaire also inaugurated the conferences at Notre-Dame-de-Paris, and Dominicans have filled that pulpit in succession since.

  In the United States, Edward Fenwick founded the province of Saint Joseph in 1805. He later became the first Bishop of Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1821. The province established the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC, in 1905.

  Scholarship drove the recovery too. In 1890, Marie-Joseph Lagrange founded the École Biblique et Archéologique française de Jérusalem, now a leading centre of biblical research. Both editions of the Jerusalem Bible were prepared there. Hyacinth Cormier established the Angelicum in Rome in 1908, and Père Thomas Coconnier founded the Revue Thomiste. The French province also produced Cardinal Yves Congar.

  The order's influence has reached beyond the Catholic Church. The Anglican Order of Preachers, in the Anglican Communion, operates more like a third order and has no canonical ties to the historical order. In the twenty-first century, an Anglo-Catholic community called the Order of Christ the Saviour was founded within the Episcopal Church.

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• 8. A Family With Many Names

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  The General Chapter holds the highest authority in the order, and its design is unique in the Catholic Church. It has two bodies. The Chapter of Provincials gathers the superiors of the provinces. The Chapter of Definitors, also spelled Diffinitors, brings grassroots representatives so that superiors do not spend too long away from their duties. Either body may propose legislation. New laws take effect only after three successive General Chapters approve them. Recent chapters met in Biên Hòa, Viet Nam, in 2019 and in Tultenango, Mexico, in 2022.

  The General Chapter elects the Master of the Order, who serves a nine-year term. The master is regarded as the successor of Dominic, the first holder of the office, who imagined it as a service to the community. As of 2022, the master is Gerard Timoner III. The 85th master, Timothy Radcliffe, is now Master Emeritus.

  The wider Dominican Family reaches well beyond the friars. Within the friars, priests sit alongside non-ordained cooperator brothers, and their life rests on four pillars: prayer, study, community and preaching. Diocesan priests can join through the Priestly Fraternities of St. Dominic. Lay Dominicans follow a rule promulgated by the Master in 1987, the fifth in a line that began in 1285. Catherine of Siena and Rose of Lima, patron saint of Peru and all of South America, belong to their number. Flannery O'Connor was a Dominican tertiary. In the twentieth century, Associates emerged: men and women who make a commitment to share the Dominican mission without taking vows.

  The order carries several nicknames. In England, the friars were Blackfriars, after the black cappa worn over a white habit. That set them apart from the Whitefriars, who were Carmelites, and the Greyfriars, who were Franciscans. In France they were Jacobins, because their Paris convent stood beside the Church of Saint-Jacques. The Latin pun Domini canes, meaning Hounds of the Lord, also grew from the name Dominican. Their mottoes include Laudare, benedicere, praedicare, meaning to praise, to bless and to preach, and the single word Veritas, meaning truth.

  Four Dominican friars have become pope: Innocent V in 1276, Benedict XI in 1303-04, Pius V from 1566 to 1572 and Benedict XIII from 1724 to 1730. Hugh of Saint-Cher became the first Dominican cardinal when he was elected in 1244. The artists Fra Angelico and Fra Bartolomeo wore the habit, and so did Allesandro della Spina, credited with inventing spectacles.

  Pope Pius XI called the Rosary the foundation on which the order rests. Tradition traces it to a vision Dominic had in 1208 at the church in Prouille, when the Virgin Mary gave him the Rosary. On the 1st of January 2008, the master of the order declared a year of dedication to it.

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