Homily for the Feast of St Dominic

The Black Abbey, Kilkenny City, 8 August 2024

It’s a great joy to be with you today both to celebrate the Feast of St Dominic and to honour the Dominican community that has existed here in Kilkenny City since 1225. Indeed, I would like to add words of gratitude to the wider Dominican family in Ireland as you celebrate this year eight hundred years of Dominican life and witness to the Gospel in this country. And focusing on the Kilkenny Dominican community, it is appropriate to note that it is one which has lived through and survived down to our own day in the face of war, plague, reformation, dispossession, Cromwell, penal laws and the secular challenges of our own times. Deo gratias.

St Dominic was born around 1170 in  Spain, and the witness and ministry of the Dominican Order developed around his teaching and example over the centuries since. The Dominicans, Order of Friars Preachers, their earliest sources say, were called to the work of ‘preaching and the salvation of souls’. Confirmed by the Pope in 1217 and given its structure by a general chapter in Bologna in 1220, it comprises friars, nuns, active sisters, and secular Dominicans (formerly the Third Order) with a universal mission. We give thanks to God for all of them today.

Dominican priories from the start, the sources tell us, were forbidden fixed revenues, particularly from property, and so were to be supported by going out to the people preaching and begging (mendicancy). St Dominic himself travelled widely: he preached and established priories in Italy, France, and Spain and almost immediately he sent friars to make foundations in Denmark, Hungary, Poland, and England.

Of course, the Dominicans (and their cousins the Franciscan friars) are not the oldest of the religious orders in the church. In earlier centuries there had been, for example, a great flowering of monasticism and monasteries beginning in the deserts of Egypt. Think about how this movement spread to Ireland in the shape of the Celtic monks in Clonmacnoise, Sceilg Mhichíl and Glendalough.  And later the arrival here from the Continent of the Benedictines and the Cistercians: consider Jerpoint Abbey, Graiguenamanagh Abbey and Christ Church Abbey (in Dublin).

What was new about the friars (Dominican and Franciscan) is that unlike the monks who made vows to the abbot of a particular monastery, with a view to living stable enclosed lives therein, friars, by contrast, were not committed to stability at a given priory or enclosure within  it. They would go out to minister to the people where they lived, preaching and teaching, and then return to their priories to rest and pray. Put simply, the final orientation of Dominican prayer and activity is not apart from the world, but within it.

One particularly important Dominican charism is a commitment to study to help them in their preaching and teaching. For Dominicans study is intended to be a fundamental asceticism, a means of personal sanctification, and an indispensable preparation for preaching. It’s not surprising then that the Dominicans have provided some of the Church’s great theologians and scholars like St Albert the Great, St Thomas Aquinas, St Catherine of Sienna of earlier times and Yves Congar, Timothy Radcliffe and Aidan Nichols in more recent ones.

The Dominican presence here in Kilkenny and Ireland in general came remarkably early with the Anglo-Normans. Historians argue that the location of the Black Abbey is directly related to the Bregach River which at that time marked the boundary between the Gaels (hence the term Irishtown) and the larger Norman community on the other side of the river. The Dominican ministry was to all.

The earliest Dominicans found themselves in a context where in twelfth century France they had to preach the Christian faith in a church ravaged by the Albigensians. These Albigensians or Cathars argued, among other things, that Jesus was merely an angel and that his human suffering and death were an illusion. It is no accident then that the first reading for today’s Memorial from St Paul (I Corinthians 2: 1-10 a) underlines the full identity of Jesus and the importance of his person and message: ‘the only knowledge I claim to have is about Jesus as the crucified Christ …’. And Paul goes on to underline the beauty of the hidden wisdom of God that faith in Jesus, the Lord of Glory, brings to those who believe.

Our own times are not dissimilar in that there is much confusion as to the full identity of Jesus Christ, as to who he truly is, and what he calls us to. Many people live lives forgetful of God, forgetful of Christ, falling into individualistic, materialistic and secularist patterns of outlook and lifestyle.

The Dominican charism of preaching, of reaching out to people where they are, of deep scholarship of the bible, of philosophy and theology is more important than ever. Preachers, teachers, evangelisers are sorely needed to entreat and form the whole people of God anew  to open our eyes to the beauty of Christ, to recognise the importance of the Gospel and  the faith in Jesus Christ that it points to. The Truth – Veritas (the Dominican motto) – that on which we can safely ground our lives and live in hope and love.

May the Lord continue to bless the Dominican friars here in Black Abbey and all the faithful who worship with them here. May lives committed to the work of ‘preaching and the salvation of souls’ endure here for many centuries to come.

+ Niall Coll

Bishop of Ossory