St. Dominic

Who they were

Dominic was a Castilian priest who, travelling through southern France, met a heresy the Church was answering with crusades and concluded it needed arguments and holiness instead. As a student in a famine he had sold his hand-annotated books, a scholar's whole wealth, saying he would not study on dead skins while people starved. The Order of Preachers he founded in 1216 put poverty, study and preaching together: friars trained hard and owning nothing, sent to the universities and the road. He governed it with a light, cheerful hand, and the accounts agree he was relentlessly joyful. He died at fifty-one in Bologna, in a borrowed habit, in another friar's bed, owning nothing at all. The tradition that Our Lady gave Dominic the rosary appears centuries later, and historians treat it as devotional legend rather than record. The association is no accident even so: his Order carried, shaped and preached the rosary into the devotion the world knows, and Dominicans remain its custodians.

Why people turn to St. Dominic

Preachers, teachers of the faith, and everyone who prays the rosary. The astronomy patronage is old and charming, and comes from the star on his brow in the iconography.

How to ask their intercession

Before you pray the rosary this week, ask Dominic to pray it with you: the man whose brothers built the prayer you are holding.