The Apostolic Life
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‘I do not read that Christ was a black monk or a white monk, but that he was a humble preacher.’ With these words a thirteenth century Dominican novice justified his choice of Order against some monks who wished him to join them instead. The essential model which St. Dominic pointed to in the thirteenth century was Christ himself, wandering round with ‘nowhere to lay his head’, proclaiming the kingdom of God. And Christ sent out his followers to do exactly the same. The Church spread throughout the world because of the restless wandering of his preachers. And throughout the ages of Christian history we find people responding to the call of God in this way, leaving their homes and often their country too, to travel round, bringing to all men the good news of Jesus Christ.

But fashions in holiness, like fashions in clothes, change from time to time, and during the Middle Ages a very different model had been taking shape, stressing rather the life of seclusion and stability. The great Benedictine family of monks and nuns was increasingly seen as the essential pattern of holiness for men and women who sought to give their lives totally to God. The Benedictine way of life provided a context in which a spiritual life could develop peacefully, in the discipline of the cloister, far removed from many of the temptations of normal life, and freed from the distractions and tensions inherent in any active apostolate. The perfection of monastic observance came to be seen as the closest approximation on earth to the régime of paradise.

But then the fashion began to change again. In the twelfth century a number of devout Christians began to feel a longing for a simpler, less organized, less secure life, more obviously modeled on the gospels. But their aspirations, on the whole, found no easy expression in the Church of the time, and many of them fell foul of ecclesiastical authority. Some of them, for whatever reasons, separated themselves altogether from the Church and began to preach strange doctrines. 

By the beginning of the thirteenth century, there was a major crisis in some parts of Europe, particularly in the south of France, where a fully-fledged anti-Church was well established, committed to the rigorous dualist doctrine that this material world is evil and that it was made, not by God, but by an evil anti-God. 

The problem was complicated by the failure, by and large, of most of the bishops and priests to present true Christian doctrine in an attractive and convincing way, or even to present it at all. The heretics found it easy to score points against the official Church, because the clergy were often not setting a very good example of Christian living either. It was difficult for people to recognize in them the authentic successors of the apostles. 

What was urgently needed was for the Church to show that the religious aspirations of the people could be met within the Church, and to proclaim in an informed and sensitive way the genuine gospel of Christ. 

In different ways both St Dominic and St Francis responded to this need. Both men adopted a way of life very similar to that which the various heretical groups had adopted, a life of utter poverty and dependence on God’s providence, an adventurous life in the world, not hidden away in monastic seclusion, a life of devotion to active service of others; in addition, Dominic set himself to preach and to attract others to preach, and he was concerned that he and his preachers should know their faith thoroughly and be able to expound it competently.

In a striking phrase, Dante describes St Dominic as l’amoroso drudo della fede cristiana, which may be roughly translated as ‘the boyfriend of the Christian faith.’ If Francis was in love with his ‘Lady Poverty’, Dominic was in love with the Christian faith. His overwhelming desire was to bring to everybody the truth of the faith, which would set them free and save their souls. While he was still quite a young man, he had prayed insistently and passionately that God would give him true charity, which would be effective in procuring the salvation of others, and he longed to spend himself totally in the service of the gospel, just as Christ had given himself even to death for the salvation of the world.

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