Dominican Saints Quotes

You know all about love, but that is not enough. You must also learn that hate comes from God as well, that it too is in the Lord's service. And in times like these, with the world fallen to the state it has, hate serves God more than love.

Another significant factor that increased pressure on the Jews was the rise of the mendicant orders of preaching friars, the Dominicans and the Franciscans. The Dominicans in particular were to become leaders in the campaign against the Jews. Saint Dominic probably never imagined that his order would initiate the Spanish Inquisition and oversee the public immolation of heretics. The only torment he advocated was self-directed.

The great self-limitation practiced by man for ten centuries yielded, between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, the whole flower of the so-called "Renaissance." The root, usually, does not resemble the fruit in appearance, but there is an undeniable connection between the root's strength and juiciness and the beauty and taste of the fruit. The Middle Ages, it seems, have nothing in common with the Renaissance and are opposite to it in every way; nonetheless, all the abundance and ebullience of human energies during the Renaissance were based not at all on the supposedly "renascent" classical world, nor on the imitated Plato and Virgil, nor on manuscripts torn from the basements of old monasteries, but precisely on those monasteries, on those stern Franciscians and cruel Dominicans, on Saints Bonaventure, Anselm of Canterbury, and Bernard of Clairvaux. The Middle Ages were a great repository of human energies: in the medieval man's asceticism, self-abnegation, and contempt for his own beauty, his own energies, and his own mind, these energies, this heart, and this mind were stored up until the right time. The Renaissance was the epoch of the discovery of this trove: the thin layer of soil covering it was suddenly thrown aside, and to the amazement of following centuries dazzling, incalculable treasures glittered there; yesterday's pauper and wretched beggar, who only knew how to stand on crossroads and bellow psalms in an inharmonious voice, suddenly started to bloom with poetry, strength, beauty, and intelligence. Whence came all this? From the ancient world, which had exhausted its vital powers? From moldy parchments? But did Plato really write his dialogues with the same keen enjoyment with which Marsilio Ficino annotated them? And did the Romans, when reading the Greeks, really experience the same emotions as Petrarch, when, for ignorance of Greek, he could only move his precious manuscripts from place to place, kiss them now and then, and gaze sadly at their incomprehensible text? All these manuscripts, in convenient and accurate editions, lie before us too: why don't they lead us to a "renascence" among us? Why didn't the Greeks bring about a "renascence" in Rome? And why didn't Greco-Roman literature produce anything similar to the Italian Renaissance in Gaul and Africa from the second to the fourth century? The secret of the Renaissance of the fourteenth-fifteenth centuries does not lie in ancient literature: this literature was only the spade that threw the soil off the treasures buried underneath; the secret lies in the treasures themselves; in the fact that between the fourth and fourteenth centuries, under the influence of the strict ascetic ideal of mortifying the flesh and restraining the impulses of his spirit, man only stored up his energies and expended nothing. During this great thousand-year silence his soul matured for The Divine Comedy; during this forced closing of eyes to the world - an interesting, albeit sinful world-Galileo was maturing, Copernicus, and the school of careful experimentation founded by Bacon; during the struggle with the Moors the talents of Velasquez and Murillo were forged; and in the prayers of the thousand years leading up to the sixteenth century the Madonna images of that century were drawn, images to which we are able to pray but which no one is able to imitate. ("On Symbolists And Decadents")

She also took advantage of all that the Catholic Church had to offer to women in the 14th century. Through the Dominican order she learned to read.

The Caribbean is still an exciting destination. I have been to just about every notable island surrounding this sea and have yet to be bored. Some of the islands are administered by other countries like Saint Martín; some are independent countries such as Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The languages differ from island to island and include English, French, Spanish, Dutch Haitian Creole and Papiamento although English is understood on most islands. This time I returned to the Dominican Republic, an island nation that I first visited when Santo Domingo was called Ciudad Trujillo in 1955 and have returned numerous times. I have also been to Haiti the country that shares the Island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic and I have stood at the mountainous border dividing the two countries. Driving around the country offers magnificent views with every turn in the road. On this visit I enjoyed the northern Atlantic coast named the Amber Coast because of the amount of amber found there. The primary site along the northern coast is La Cordillera Septentrional. The amber-bearing stones named clastic rocks are usually washed down the steep inclines along with sandstone and other debris and are even found in deep water at the end of the run. The Amber Coast of the Dominican Republic has mostly low mountains and beautiful beaches. Overlooking the city of Puerto Plata is Mount Isabel de Torres, which is covered by dense jungles but can be ascended by a cableway. Some of these jungle areas were used as sites for the movie Jurassic Park. A new 30 acre tourist port for Carnival Cruise Lines has been constructed in Amber Cove at a cost of $85 Million. It is one of the newest destinations to visit in the Caribbean and well worth the effort.

We must bear in mind that renewal of the Church has often come through the laity. Who are the three great patron saints of Europe? St Benedict, St Francis of Assisi and St Catherine of Siena.

The universal Church touched every corner of western Europe and practically all aspects of life from politics to market behavior, but it was not a monolithic institution. Very much the opposite: Because it channeled and encompassed practically all spiritual life, the Church, by necessity, had to be a big tent. It contained multitudes: poor, illiterate priests in isolated rural parishes with secret wives and broods of children, who rarely saw their uninterested parishioners; charismatic Dominican preachers capable of attracting crowds of thousands in towns and cities; places like the brand-new castle church of Wittenberg, built in Renaissance style and packed with holy relics in expensive gilded cases; towering Gothic cathedrals, already centuries old, dominating the skylines of the continent’s prosperous urban centers and serving as headquarters for rich, powerful bishops who pulled political strings from London to Leipzig; leaky-roofed monasteries, housed by a few elderly monks in threadbare robes begging for donations to fix a tumbledown refectory; university theologians steeped in the brutally dense works of Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham who spent their time teaching students and arguing about scholastic philosophy; devout laywomen, reading books of hours in the privacy of their prosperous homes; sword-swinging Hospitaller Knights, soldier-monks in armor and black habits, beheading Muslim sailors on the decks of galleys under a blue Mediterranean sky. The Church was all of these things: corrupt and saintly, worldly and mystical, impossibly wealthy and desperately impoverished.

Their bodies were said to have been translated to Constantinople under the first Christian emperors. From thence they were conveyed to Milan, where the place in which they were deposited is still shown in the Dominicans’ church of that city. The emperor Frederick Barbarossa having taken Milan, caused them to be translated to Cologne in Germany, in the twelfth century.

The Dominicans count among their order the great St. Thomas Aquinas, author of the magisterial tract Summa Theologiae and one of the most important theologians in the history of the Catholic Church. Naturally, my father took the opportunity to criticize the saint’s approach to legal interpretation, going so far as to read a passage from Aquinas and comparing it to something an activist judge would have written.

Yet only Dominicans believe that the Church adopted this law of individualization, or even assented to it. If M. Jourdain is right, Thomas was quickly obliged to give it another form:—that, though all souls belonged to the same species, they differed in their aptitudes for uniting with particular bodies.

He was Father Richard Freeman, Order of Preachers, a first order Dominican priest. Of course he was a Dominican, when you want a truly educated Catholic, you don’t go to the Pseudo-intellectuals in the Jesuits.

May the Lord give you peace," was Francis's most common remark to people. What a contrast this was to the apocalyptic fear-mongering of most other wandering spiritual groups in those days, and how different it was even from the doctrinaire preaching of the new Dominican Order.

No one really loves the naked truth,” the old man replied. “It’s fine in theory, practical only in the dreams of youth. There is the schoolmaster, who shook things up in a vacuum, the heart of a child who only wanted to do good and ended up mocked and laughed at. You told me you are a stranger in your own land, and I can believe it. From the moment you arrived, you began to wound the pride of a priest who the people believe is a saint and whose peers consider wise. May God grant that this development has not predicted your future. Don’t think that because Dominicans and Augustines look down on the twill cassock, the rope belt, and the indecent

No one really loves the naked truth,” the old man replied. “It’s fine in theory, practical only in the dreams of youth. There is the schoolmaster, who shook things up in a vacuum, the heart of a child who only wanted to do good and ended up mocked and laughed at. You told me you are a stranger in your own land, and I can believe it. From the moment you arrived, you began to wound the pride of a priest who the people believe is a saint and whose peers consider wise. May God grant that this development has not predicted your future. Don’t think that because Dominicans and Augustines look down on the twill cassock, the rope belt, and the indecent lack of shoes, because once upon a time a great doctor of Saint Thomas recorded that Pope Innocent III had labeled the statues of that order as more appropriate for pigs than for men, not all of them

Dominicans and the Inquisition The order took a significantly more militant stand after the death of their founder. Saint Dominic’s vision of converting heretics—particularly the Cathars—through sermons and by leading an exemplary life proved too slow for the church. In 1231 Pope Gregory IX issued a bull condemning heretics, calling on secular authorities to punish them with the “appropriate penalty.” At the same time, the Holy Roman emperor Frederick II announced that the appropriate penalty for heretics was “to be burned alive in the sight of the people.

Other versions, all glorifying the child as a sainted martyr, followed. Spain’s greatest playwright, Lope de Vega, produced his version, El Nino Inocente de la Guardia, around 1610. His play opens with Queen Isabella receiving a vision from the founder of the Dominicans telling her, in a dream, to found the Inquisition and expel the Jews. The dream is followed by a lament from converso/Jews. Any sympathy for the Jews ends as Lope de Vega portrays them first as buffoons, then as villains who kidnap a young child. The child has a chance to escape but embraces martyrdom and receives his torments happily, watched over by an angel who promises him redemption.19 The child became known as “Little Christobalico,” the patron saint of La Guardia, and his shrine was visited by several kings (though the child was never formally recognized as a saint by the Vatican). The shrine is still maintained; in the Church of La Guardia, parishioners still gather before it to sing the hymn named for it (videos of the hymn and images of the child can be readily found on the Internet).