What is a Lay Dominican?

No, it’s not a person who comes from the island nation of the Dominican Republic, though the island nation was named after the same St. Dominic de Guzman, the founder of what is informally referred to as the Dominican Order.  So the Lay Dominicans are the lay (non-consecrated) branch of the Catholic religious order formally known as the Order of Preachers, founded by St. Dominic and officially approved by the papacy on December 22^nd 1216.  Yes, we had our 800^th anniversary a few years ago.  That still might be a bit much to comprehend, especially if you are not Catholic.  Let me break this down in a scholastic way—in the fashion of St. Thomas Aquinas the premier Dominican of scholasticism—so that Catholics and non-Catholics alike can understand.

What is a religious order? 

A religious order is a community of people who come together to live under a rule of life.  The first communities that could be construed as religious orders, though there was nothing official about them, were the desert fathers and mothers of the fourth century.  Once the Roman persecution of Christianity ended under the Emperor Constantine, life for Christians suddenly became easier and less stressful.  Not only were they no longer persecuted, but they were exalted.  You would think everyone would be happy with that.  However, many felt that Christianity should have a certain sense of carrying the cross for one’s faith. 

When Christianity came out from underground and became the accepted religion, some people found living out their faith too easy and somewhat tainted by the worldliness of everyday life.  So some decided to remove themselves from society and go to the desert to live out their faith away from the world.  They came to be known as the Desert Fathers and Mothers.  Over time groups formed and decided to live in common, and that became the start of monasticism.  People formed religious groups with rules of practice to try to live out their version of the Gospel. 

I should emphasize that all religious orders are attempting to emulate some aspect of life as portrayed in the Gospels.  I imagine the early hermits were trying to emulate Christ or John the Baptist alone in the desert.  When communities in common formed and created monasteries to seclude themselves from worldly society, monastic life then was an emulating of the apostles and the common life as delineated in the early chapters of Acts of the Apostles.  Both the Western Latin and Eastern Greek sides of the Church created monasteries that lived under their specific rules.  In fact as I looked it up, all the Apostolic Churches (Coptic, Byzantine, Eastern, Roman, and others) have some form of monastic life with religious called monks and nuns.  I don’t know that much about the others, so I will limit myself to those of the Roman Catholic Church.

In the west, monasteries in time essentially gravitated to the Rule of St.Benedict, and the most well-known of the medieval monasteries were Benedictine.  It should be pointed out here that monasteries were either all male or all female, which gave women in their monasteries an unprecedented amount of freedom and autonomy and access to education, administering and leading their monasteries.  Saints Scholastica (St. Benedict’s sister) and Hildegard of Bingen had notable accomplishments as women that were not possible in the secular world.  Benedictine monasteries became so popular that various versions formed, such as Cistercian, Trappist, and Carthusians, each with their own version of the Rule.  At the heart of St. Benedict’s rule is the notion of work and pray.  The day was divided into the eight liturgical hours where community prayer was held and in between was either work or sleep: ora et labora, pray and work. 

It is a misunderstanding of the early Middle Ages to think that learning and knowledge degenerated as a result of Christianity.  These Christian monasteries actually preserved knowledge as the Classical World underwent a collapse from the barbarian take over.  Today there are those who call for the Benedictine Option in dealing with the current collapse of Judeo-Christian values, recalling the early Benedictine monasteries as they preserved learning and culture.  Even Protestants have talked about segregating themselves from the caustic post-Christian culture we have today.  But I think most religious at some point wish to separate from the surrounding culture.  It’s a recurring impulse among religious people.

So all these orders of the first millennia were essentially separatists from society but by the high Middle Ages when cities became more prominent again across Europe there was a need to engage with the general population.  Orders formed to address various public needs: Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites, and others.  These orders were not separated in monasteries but engaged the general public, mostly fulfilling some sort of role and providing a service to the community.  So instead of separating from society the new orders were itinerant, moving about, and teaching.  The Dominicans were established to combat the heretical theological groups that had formed in Southern France (the Albigensians) but also to address the general ignorance of the faith that was about.  Ignorance of the faith has not been limited to our times.

And in time more religious orders formed.  By the late middle ages you had the Jesuits, whose charism is missionary, and then by the Renaissance and up to this day you have a plethora of orders who go out and address needs such as poverty or health.  Little Sisters of the Poor is one that's been in the news that you may have heard; or you may have heard of Mother Teresa's order (Sisters of Charity), or the Salesians, who are known for helping and teaching poor children across the world. 

Notice the trend over the two millennia.  What started from individual hermits developed to communities, then to groups that engage the public, and finally to activist groups.  These orders which at one time were limited to enclosed monasteries spread across the world, attempting to deal with the direct needs of others.  While there are still hermits and monasteries, the impulse over time has been not inward nor secluded but outward.

This impulse to strive for holiness by forming a community and living under a rule is not limited to Catholics and Orthodox.  In some ways Protestants also have informal orders, though they may not call it that.  Protestants send out missionaries across the world.  Some live in separated communities.  Take the Amish, for instance.  They live under a rule based on a Biblical understanding of holiness.  One of my favorite historical Protestant denominations are the Shakers who secluded themselves under a very strict rule, which unfortunately caused their extinction.  I also think of the Salvation Army as an informal Protestant order.  And this phenomena is not limited to just Christians.  We know Buddhists have monasteries with monks and nuns.  Can’t the Hasidim in Judaism be thought of as living in a community under a rule of life?  It’s more complicated than that, but on some level there are similarities. 

So in summary a religious order is a community that have ordered their lives around a particular rule in effort to achieve a greater holiness.

What is the Dominican Order?

Having outlined the essence of a religious order, what then is specifically the Order of Preachers, which is the official name of the Dominicans?  St. Dominic in his humility emphatically did not to want the order to be named after him, but reverence held for the founding father could not totally honor that wish.  Just as the Franciscans are named after their founder, St. Francis of Assisi, the Order of Preachers are informally, though fairly commonly, referred to as the Dominicans.

As I mentioned, the need for the Dominican Order came about by a particular heresy that had formed in southern France by the 12th century, but the need was compounded by an awareness of a general ignorance about the faith.  Frankly I’m inclined to believe that such ignorance exists in every century; just look around us today.  One can understand the ignorance of a non-literate agrarian society, but what’s our excuse?  So the Order of Preachers were set up to explain the faith, and one can only credibly communicate the faith if one lives the faith.  So those consecrated to religious life take vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. 

To combat ignorance and heresy, what was required then was study and learning.  St. Dominic’s great innovation on the Benedictine Rule was to replace work with study.  So the Dominican approach to holiness was to study the faith and communicate it to others.  And so, he called it the Order of Preachers.  Here too they saw themselves as fulfilling an aspect of Gospel life.  The same impulse to strive to a greater holiness than the world offered was still at work.  The Dominicans can trace their charism to a passage in the first chapter of Mark:

 

Rising very early before dawn, he [Jesus] left and went off to a deserted place, where he prayed.  Simon and those who were with him pursued him and on finding him said, “Everyone is looking for you.”  He told them, “Let us go on to the nearby villages that I may preach there also. For this purpose have I have come.”  So he went into their synagogues, preaching and driving out demons throughout the whole of Galilee. (Mk 1:35-39)

As the Desert Fathers saw themselves as embracing Christ’s life in the desert, and as the Benedictines saw themselves as embracing the apostles after the Ascension, the Dominicans saw themselves as embracing Christ the preacher, at times retreating to be contemplative, and then other times engaging the public with His Word.  Notice the contemplation, which amounts to study and prayer, but then the going out and preaching, the engagement with the world.  That's the heart of Dominican spirituality.  

While the first Dominicans were mostly students in the universities, in short order the universities across Europe were filled with Dominican friars teaching and leading studies.  It’s possible to see a synergistic effect between the rise of the universities in the High Middle Ages and the rise of the Dominican Order.  As the Universities grew, so did the Dominican Order; as the Dominican Order grew, so did learning, publishing, and debate accelerate in the universities.  It is interesting to see how spread across Europe were those early Dominicans.  Just to name a few from its first two generations: St. Dominic was from Spain; his successor, Bl. Raymond of Saxony (Northern Germany), St. Albert the Great (Southern Germany), Giles of Santarém (Portugal), Reginald of Orleans (France), St. Hyacinth of Poland, St. Thomas Aquinas (Italy), and Gilbert of Fresney, who established the first chapter at Oxford in 1221, just five years after the Order was officially formed.  If there was a university in your medieval city, there were friars teaching in it.

One of the ways to describe the nature of Dominican spirituality is by listing the four pillars of Dominican life: prayer, study, community, and apostolate.  Prayer and study are rather obvious, and community is simply the fact that the religious live in common, such as a convent for nuns, a priory for sisters, or a friary for friars.  But community can also imply a larger shared community of the heart for all Dominicans, not just those you share an abode.   Apostolate is a personal or group activity that one does to bring Christ to the world.  It’s roughly synonymous with how people use the word “ministry” such as some might consider providing or working at a soup kitchen “their ministry.”  For Dominicans, it’s usually more of an intellectual endeavor, though it doesn’t have to be.  A Dominican’s life, then, is centered on those four pillars.

The other way to explain Dominican spirituality is understand three mottos of the order.  First is Veritas, or “Truth,” and this refers to communicating the Truth of the Gospel.  “For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth” Jesus says in Jn 18:37.  So one of the Dominican missions is to testify to the Truth.  A second motto is Laudare, benedicere, praedicare, “To praise, to bless, and to preach.”  That I think shows the dual nature of Dominican spirituality: contemplative prayer (blessing and praising) and reaching out to communicate (preaching). 

The third motto is I think the most insightful: Contemplata aliis trader, or “to hand down to others the fruits of contemplation."  A Dominican doesn’t study for the sake of study or for the sake of mere contemplation.  He must hand down and share the fruits of his learning and his contemplation.  He or she studies to bring the wisdom and truth of the Gospels into the world, and therefore shine a light to testify to the light that enlightens everyone. 

I should also point out how varied the Order has been over the centuries.  Yes, Thomas Aquinas, perhaps the most well-known Dominican, is known for his philosophic and theological writings, and to many that is the ideal when they think of Dominicans.  But Dominicans have been part of many disciplines.  Quite a number were leaders in medieval law.   A number of Dominicans were missionaries across the globe as they followed the great explorers.  Friar Bartolome de las Casas may have been one of the first human rights activists in history as he pleaded to the King of Spain for the rights and dignity of the natives in the New World.  There were Dominicans who explored the sciences, such as St. Albert the Great.   Famous mystics like Catherine of Siena and Meister Eckhart.  Writers and poets such Henry Susso, Matteo Bandello, who a few of his stories found their way into Shakespeare’s plays, and Sigrid Undset, the 20^th century Norwegian novelist who won the Nobel Prize in literature.  There were great painters such as Fra Bartolomeo and the extraordinary Fra Angelico.  All Dominicans who preached the faith through their special God given talents nurtured through Dominican spirituality.

 

What is a Lay Dominican?

We finally come to the question.  A Lay Dominican, also referred to as a Third Order Dominican—the friars being the First Order, the sisters being the Second, and the laity being the Third—are a branch of the Order of Preachers reserved for the laity.  Lay people began being attracted to the overall Order almost immediately after the Order’s founding, culminating in an official recognition by the year 1286.  We are approaching 750 years of existence.  Some of the Dominican’s most famous saints were actually Third Order, such as St. Catherine of Siena.  A Lay Dominican is obviously a non-consecrated member, who does not take vows of poverty and chastity.  Instead of vows we do make promises, which are to live to the rule as modified for the laity and live out a Dominican spirituality. 

What does that mean exactly?  That can be answered by how we address the four pillars I mentioned above. 

(1) Prayer:  We are required to pray daily two of the liturgical hours of the Divine Office, Lauds (Morning Prayer) and Vespers (Evening Prayer) and to pray a daily rosary.  Each of the three takes about fifteen minutes.  We are required to attend Mass daily if possible (not possible for me, I work, but I try to catch a service on TV) and go to Confession once a month, which I admit am woefully delinquent. 

(2) Study.  We are required to read scripture constantly, read religious books that enlighten scripture and increase devotion, and whatever may help support your particular apostolate.  The formation process, which lasts five years—which follows the same process as the religious, that is Novice, Postulant, Temporary Promise, Final Promise—requires one to learn the faith and its history through a series of study modules.

(3) Community.  One participates in and supports the Dominican community.  The Order is an international organization, broken down into provinces, sub broken down into regions, and finally chapters.  The headquarters are located in Rome at the Basilica of Santa Sabina, which is a church that dates back to the year 432.  I count about forty provinces worldwide, and there are four in the United States.  A chapter meeting is once a month, unless you have some special activities that could lead to meet more frequently.  A regional meeting is about once a quarter, but attendance to those are optional, unless you’re an officer in the chapter.  I’ve never attended above a regional meeting.  Annual dues are a very reasonable roughly $100 per year, depending on your chapter. 

(4) Apostolate.  First each chapter is assigned an apostolate to work on together.  Our chapter has been assigned ending human trafficking, which is not an easy endeavor to work toward.  There aren’t any national or local marches and events to participate in.  What we’ve done is mostly written to legislators and pray on the issue and when the subject happens to come up in conversation try to raise awareness.  Second, we each have our own personal apostolate, which doesn’t have to be very elaborate.  Some of the older members mostly support through prayer.  Some teach catechism at parishes or help out their churches in some way.  My apostolate includes moderating a Catholic book club at Goodreads, maintaining this blog where I write about the goodness, truth, and beauty of literature (sometimes dabbling in art and music as well), and where I also post devotional meditations and other Catholic information.  Well, you know what I do here.  I also participate in the pro-life movement, such as praying in front of abortion facilities and attending the annual March in Washington.  My apostolate keeps me busy.

God bless.  If any of this interests you and you feel you have a calling to be a Lay Dominican, either contact me or try one of these links: The Northeast Province in the United States, or the link on laity from the main Order of Preachers website.  

I hope that gave people an understanding of religious orders, of the Dominican Order, and of Lay Dominicans.  I do try to live my faith.  As C.S. Lewis said, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”