St. Dominic
Founder of the Order of Preachers
The preacher to whom tradition says Our Lady herself entrusted the Rosary — a man who sold his books to feed the starving and founded an order to bring light where there was error.
- Feast
- August 8
- Lived
- c. 1170–1221
Invoked For
- Astronomers
- Preachers
- The Dominican Republic
- Those who pray the Rosary
His Life
Dominic de Guzmán was born around 1170 in Caleruega, in Castile. As a student at Palencia during a famine, he sold everything he had — including his precious hand-copied books — to feed the starving, saying he would not study on dead skins while men died of hunger.
Travelling through southern France as a young priest, he found whole regions swept by the Albigensian heresy, which taught that the material world was evil — that the body, the family, and bread itself were things to be despised. Dominic saw that the heresy was not being answered: the preachers sent against it arrived with retinues and fine horses, while the heretics lived austerely. He resolved to answer poverty with greater poverty and argument with better argument, travelling on foot, owning nothing, and debating anyone who would listen.
Out of that resolve grew the Order of Preachers — the Dominicans — founded in 1216: an order of men vowed to poverty and study, sent out to preach. His rule was simple and his confidence total. He was said to speak only to God or about God, and his brethren testified that he spent his nights in prayer, often in tears for sinners: "O Lord, what will become of sinners?"
A tradition cherished for centuries holds that during those years of struggle, Our Lady appeared to Dominic and gave him the Rosary as the weapon that would succeed where argument alone had failed — prayer joined to preaching, the Gospel contemplated mystery by mystery. It is why the Rosary has been in Dominican hands ever since, and why this website's own devotion traces back, link by link, to him.
The Path to Sainthood
Dominic died at Bologna on August 6, 1221, worn out at about fifty, lying on borrowed bedding because he owned none of his own. His last words to his grieving brothers were a promise: "Do not weep, for I shall be more useful to you after my death than I ever was in life."
He was canonized only thirteen years later, in 1234, by Pope Gregory IX — a friend who had known him personally and who declared he no more doubted Dominic's sanctity than he doubted that of St. Peter or St. Paul.
His order gave the Church some of her greatest minds — St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Catherine of Siena among them — and the Rosary tradition entrusted to him was confirmed again and again by the popes, who to this day call the Rosary 'the Psalter of Mary' that Dominic's sons carried into the whole world.
Prayers to St. Dominic
Tap any prayer to open it large and clear — set for reading aloud. Close it to return here and choose another.