St. Dominic

A Castilian canon who, traveling through southern France, was struck by the depth of the Albigensian heresy and the inability of comfortable preachers to answer it. He founded the Order of Preachers — the Dominicans — to combine rigorous study with apostolic poverty. Tradition holds that the Blessed Virgin gave him the rosary as a weapon for the spiritual warfare of the times.

Born in Caleruega around 1170, Dominic studied theology and Scripture at Palencia before becoming a canon of the cathedral of Osma. His journey through Languedoc revealed to him that only preachers who lived as poorly as the heretics they opposed could win a hearing; from that conviction the Dominican charism was born.

He died at Bologna in 1221, barely fifty, having planted houses of his order across Europe and having sent his friars to the new universities of Paris, Oxford, and Bologna. Thomas Aquinas, Catherine of Siena, and countless other luminaries would walk the path he opened — a path of truth pursued in poverty and proclaimed with charity.