Our People

Homily for the Eighth Centenary Celebrations of the Order of Friars Preachers (“Dominicans”)

Holy Name Priory Church, Wahroonga

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
27/10/2006

In a letter to the whole Dominican family this April past, Carlos Azpiroz Costa, Successor of St Dominic, decreed “a novena of years” of commemoration – from this year in which we celebrate eight centuries since Dominic founded his first community of women in Prouille, through to 1216 when we will celebrate eight centuries since Pope Honorius III confirmed the Order of friars with their sister monasteries and lay associates. Nine years of celebrations: now that’s my kind of party!

In our history, Father Master notes, there are many events that encourage us to renew our faithfulness to our vocation as sons and daughters of St Dominic “to contemplate and share the fruits of our contemplation” with others. Eight centuries ago Our Holy Father Dominic had an experience of “Signadou” at Fanjeaux. Here he understood that the old church of Notre Dame de Prouille would somehow be the starting point of his mission to bring Good News to a world divided by the heresy of Albigensianism. And so he gathered women converts from that dark cult to the true Catholic faith into a monastery and associated them to his ‘holy preaching’ by their prayer and penance. He gave them as Patrons the Blessed Virgin Mary, the perfect disciple, and St Mary Magdalene, a penitent like themselves who was also the first to proclaim the Resurrection of Christ.

Those first holy women, Father Master points out, “encourage us to have no fear, to go forth in the highways and byways to meet those who thirst for God; they compel us to live a passion for Christ and for humanity.” And so as we mark eight centuries of Dominican life and service I know I speak for Tom Cassidy and Rosemary Lewins, our two provincials and all my brother and sister Dominicans in expressing our gratitude to Bishop David Walker, to Fr Stephen Hume the Parish Priest, and all the community of the Parish of Holy Name – happily still called “the Priory” church – for inviting us to celebrate with them here tonight. It is with great generosity that you have kept the spirit of Dominic alive herein Wahroonga these past years. I am especially pleased to be back in the parish where I served as a deacon and where I was ordained a priest fifteen years ago – with the very same MC, surrounded by many of the same brothers and sisters, and with of the same parishioners present or in the choir. I hope and pray a new generation of Dominican friars and sisters may hail from amongst the young people here tonight to assist with the music. Many of them come from Prouille school – a school with a convent named for the very foundation whose eighth centenary we celebrate. Also we are delighted that there are children here from St Lucy’s. I guess that many Dominican ghosts haunt this Church and priory, convent and school and parish; I hope that many Dominican memories are also treasured here.

In another Priory, that of San Marco in Florence, there is in the Chapter Room a painted genealogy of the Order, descending from the Cross which is our tree of life, through the hands of St Dominic, and through the full-sized saints and characters of the Order such as there had been by the early fifteenth century. Every generation adds to that genealogy of Dominican saints and sinners and I trust that our generation here in Australia will add names to list of former as well as the latter!

Family history is very fashionable today, even if we do not usually commit it to paint on a Priory wall. Lots of people do research into birth, baptism, funeral and other registers, or through libraries or the internet, to discover and perhaps write up their family tree and story. It is an interesting phenomenon in a world which in so many respects seems to have amnesia. If you ask many young people to put in chronological order Martin Luther King, Martin Luther, Aristotle and Aristotle Onassis they would probably have no idea. Amidst rapid social, technological, economic and cultural change, we have little sense of custom, inheritance and genealogy or we flail about trying to reinvent it.

Recently a woman came to me in my parish to ask if I would instruct her to be received into the Catholic Church. Her reason was that she wanted a tradition, a history, a structure of meaning she could rely on and be at home in. She wanted to join a family. Some people imagine memories and history are a constraint on creativity, imagination, the future. But those who lack sense of history are doomed to repeat the worst of past and to miss out on repeating the best. They will lack a sense of own identity. They will be rootless. People with amnesia are not freer!

In the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass we remember, we engage in anamnesis, the literal opposite of amnesia. Christ gives us the sacrament of memory. In his last letter, issued to priests just a week before he died, Pope John Paul II said that “through his daily repetition in persona Christi of the words of the ‘memorial’, the priest is invited to develop a spirituality of remembrance. The priest,” he went on to say, “is called to be, within the community entrusted to him, the man who faithfully remembers the entire mystery of Christ: prefigured in the Old Testament, fulfilled in the New, and understood ever more deeply, under guidance of the Spirit” who, as Jesus promised, brings all things to remembrance. I think Pope John Paul would forgive me extending his words beyond the priesthood to a religious Order and family like ourselves: we too must be people with a sense of our family history, of that genealogy of saints and sinners to which we belong, all those who have gone before us in Order marked with the sign of faith.

An elderly pope of former times was introduced to someone whom he was told was older than him. “Older than us?” said the puzzled Pope, “But we are 1700 years old!” Well, our Dominican family is not as old as the papacy, but at 800 we are not doing too badly! Tonight as we reflect upon that history we engage in more than a personal nostalgia trip. It is more like a family reunion. We invite to the table of the Eucharist all eight centuries of Dominicans who have gone before us.

First, of course, the saints. Our Holy Father Dominic is here with those first women collaborators who were “the Holy Preaching of Prouille”. So are the first generation or two of courageous friars who joined him in his preaching and teaching mission, such as Sts Peter Martyr, Raymond of Peñafort, Hyacinth, Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. Eckhart, Tauler and Suso are here, as are their women mystic counterparts such as St Margaret of Hungary, St Agnes of Montepulciano, Bld Margaret Ebner, Mechtild of Magdeburg, St Catherine of Siena and St Catherine de Ricci. Fiery preachers include St Vincent Ferrer, Fra Angelico’s prior and collaborator St Antoninus, his successor Savonarola and St Pius V. From the new world Bartolomé de las Casas joins us, and Martín de Porres, Rose of Lima, Juan Marcias, Louis Bertrand and the sixteen Dominican martyrs of Nagasaki. Most of the canonised martyrs of Vietnam were of course Dominicans – indeed, of the many Dominican bishops who are saints or blesseds, it is a lesson to me that most found their way there through martyrdom!

Then there are umpteen beati – friars, sisters and especially Dominican laity – including preachers and inquisitors, students and scholars, contemplatives and itinerants, popes and masters-general, priors and prioresses, artists and poets, chaplains and chaplets, widows and social workers, missionaries and educators, stigmatists and miracle-workers, ascetics and peacemakers, apostates and converts, reformers and deformers, mystics and hysterics. In living memory there have been the likes of Hyacinth-Marie Cormier, Bartolo Longo, Pier Giorgio Frassati, Julia Stanislava Rodzinska and twenty beatified Dominican martyrs of the Spanish Civil War.

Now that’s quite a roll-call – and what a diverse and fascinating bunch they are! It seems to me that, in all humility, our spiritual family has included an extraordinary range of characters and spiritualities – and this, I think, more than any shrine or work or miraculous sign is the greatest tribute to Dominic and those first Dominican girls of eight centuries ago. They started something quite remarkable in the history of humanity. In addition to those whose heroic virtues and epic vices have been particularly noted by the Church, each of us can call to mind Dominicans less universally known but who have had an extraordinary impact on our own lives – including the many friars and sisters who have served in this parish of Wahroonga. These too we invite to join us at our Eucharist tonight and at the nine years of partying to follow.

My novice master began our noviciate with a declaration that we were there to become Dominican saints, nothing less. He said that if we didn’t want to be saints, if we were too humble to aspire to those dizzy heights and would be satisfied with a close shave with the other place, then we hadn’t really ever joined the Church. Colourful rhetoric aside, he was right of course. Christ asks nothing less of each one of the baptized than that they be saints, and (because he never asks the impossible of anyone) he empowers each to be nothing less. Hence the emphasis of the Second Vatican Council on “the universal call to holiness”. Sanctity is not the preserve of a few special people: it is for you and me.

My novice master went on (he often went on…) to say that if we didn’t want to be Dominican saints, we should leave and become a different kind of saint. Again he was right of course: for we found in the Order a particular way of being Christians, Catholics, brothers and sisters, contemplatives and preachers; a distinctive path, we hope, to sanctity for ourselves and others; a new, truly Christian identity.

When I first started exploring the possibility that I had a Dominican vocation – and came sniffing about up here at Wahroonga – I was told by a diocesan priest that the Order of Preachers were renowned for their bad preaching. No matter, he said, the Sisters of Mercy were famously merciless and as for the Sisters of Charity… Well, whatever of the reputation of the Wahroonga Dominicans, St Dominic may well have been no great shakes as a preacher himself. In a century of great preachers, many of whose homilies have been preserved for posterity, we have none of Dominic’s: no-one seemed to think them worth keeping. In a century of mass conversions, there are no such stories of Dominic’s words bring thousands to the faith. Instead the friars rather pathetically retell the story of a single heretic publican whom Dominic argued with right through the night and wore down as much by exhaustion and alcohol as by his fine arguments. There are many lessons in that, such as that conversion occurs one by one, and that Dominicans can turn almost any place, including the pub, into a field of harvest of souls. Yet so minimal was St Dominic’s impact on his target audience that it took a crusade in the Prouille area to return it to the Catholic faith.

So if Dominic’s gift may not have been that of the great preacher, what was it that he did eight centuries ago that survives and thrives even at the opposite end of the world and amidst such diverse figures as I have listed tonight? Dominic’s genius was partly as an administrator. This is not generally regarded as a glorious rôle in our world, but he demonstrates its importance. He was a builder not of church architecture but of an institution: in the five years he had between receiving papal permission for his Order and his own death, Dominic shaped a new species of Catholic micro-organism, the friar preacher, and bred them at such a rate that in those five short years his band of only sixteen collaborators had already grown to sixty priories filled with some exceptional men. Nearby them spiritually and often physically were monasteries of Dominican women: in due course the tertiaries and congregations of active Dominican women would also evolve as permanent aspects of Dominic’s family. His successor, Blessed Jordan, was elected Master of the Order while still, as it were, in formation – the brethren relying on Dominic’s promised intercession before the throne of God. Jordan was to give the habit to more than a thousand friars in his term as Master. And it all began, institutionally at least, with the event we celebrate tonight: Dominic’s first foundation, of a group of women in the South of France.

Together these men and women and their successors established a tradition, the passing on of a form of life, which itself is a means of passing on the Sacred Traditio of our Church, the Word of God. In a balanced life of contemplation of veritas in liturgy and study, within the context of a community, marked by the evangelical counsels and especially by the apostolic passion for the Gospel, Dominic had invented a vehicle for the reception and transmission of the revelation once imparted in Christ Jesus for every generation to see and hear and live. Eight hundred years from now there will no doubt be more glorious and inglorious stories to tell. I hope the Bishop, Parish Priest and Provincials won’t mind me saying I hope there will be priories full of friars and sisters back here by then. But whatever God and Dominic have in store for our family, thanks be to God that we are lucky enough to be part of it!