Word and Witness within the Dominican charism
I have been asked to talk about the Dominican charism. A charism is like a religious
community’s DNA. It is passed from one generation to another, shaping who we are in ways
that are often barely conscious. We used to think that most DNA was junk. Now we are
discovering that apparently useless genes have their vital functions. And so it is with our
religious DNA, all sorts of customs and songs and ways of doing things belong to these odd
ways of living which we call being Dominican or Jesuit or Mercy or Ursuline. Understanding
these is important if we are to transmit our religious DNA to future generations. This is
especially so when we are handing over the mission to new people, often laity.
What about the Dominicans? My family and friends were rather surprised when I announced
that I wanted to become a Dominican. My Benedictine great uncle who baptised me remarked
that Dominicans tended to be very intelligent, and that they probably would not let me in. He
then relented and said that he had in fact known some stupid Dominicans and so I had a chance.
But why the Dominicans? I have often recounted that at my Benedictine school, I was one of
the bad boys, given to smoking up a dark lane, and escaping to the nearest safe pub. I was
almost thrown out of school for reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover during Benediction. When I
left school I began to make friends who were not Catholic or even Christian and they questioned
whether my faith was true. And that became for me the great question. Is it all true? If it is,
then it must be important. Then I remembered that there was an Order whose motto is Veritas,
truth. I could not remember which Order and had to phone my Benedictine monks. They told
me and I thought: that’s the order for me. At that stage I had never met a Dominican, which
may have been just as well!
But what is this Truth which we love? Two major figures stand at the fount of our tradition, St
Dominic and St Thomas Aquinas. They could hardly be more different from each other.
Dominic lived on the road, and Thomas in his study and the lecture room. Dominic left no
written records behind him except a few letters. Thomas was an academic who wrote libraries
of books and could dictate to three or four secretaries at the same time. Some Dominicans find
their inspiration primarily in Dominic, others in Aquinas.
I wish to suggest that the word and witness of the Dominican charism is rooted in the interplay
of the two. Both were concerned with the truth in different and complementary ways. Often
when the Order’s word and witness is most vigorous, we can find a similar interplay between
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Dominicans immersed in the turmoil of life and those who are sit back and reflect. Sometimes
it is one and same person who does both.
Dominic was deeply moved by what he experienced. During a famine, when he was a young
canon, he saw the starving and sold his books to feed them. He said that live skins are worth
more than the dead skins of his vellum books. It would have taken a lot to convince Thomas to
sell his books! Dominic was traveling through the south of France with his bishop, Diego, when
he encountered the Albigensians and saw the life that they lived. Incidentally, it is said that a
Dominican and a Jesuit were chatting about which was the greatest Order. The Dominican said:
‘We were founded to combat the Albigensians and you Jesuits the Protestants. When did you
last meet an Albigensian?’
Felicísimo Martínez OP described Dominican spirituality as ‘open-eyed.’ Chrys McVey
commented: ‘Dominic was moved to tears – and to action – by the starving in Palencia, by the
innkeeper in Toulouse, by the plight of some women in Fanjeaux. But that’s not enough to
explain his tears. They flowed from the discipline of an open-eyed spirituality that did not miss
a thing. Truth is the motto of the Order – not its defence (as often understood), rather its
perception. And keeping one’s eyes open so as not to miss a thing, that can make the eyes
smart.1’
He saw that the bishops and monks who were sent to preach to Albigensians were ineffective
because they dictated from on high, from their grand horses. Dominic got off his high horse
and walked with Albigensians, argued and ate with them. He immersed himself in their world.
He understood their criticism of a Church that had become rich and self-indulgent. So this is a
truth which is founded on experience, on keeping your eyes open and your ears attuned. It is
knowledge learned through your skin.
But Dominic realised that preachers needed a strong theological formation, and so he sent his
young friars to the new universities which were beginning to flourish in the thirteenth century:
Bologna, Paris, Madrid and Oxford. This was not just so that they would learn what to say
when they preached, but because seeing truly requires thinking clearly.
Thomas Aquinas was born about four years after the death of Dominic. At first sight one might
think that the sort of truth with which he was concerned was poles apart: abstract, intellectual,
just the sort of person who might be caught counting angels on pinheads. But his theology
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Unpublished lecture
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provides a profound underpinning to Dominic’s mission. Aquinas believed in the fundamental
goodness of the world. Grace perfects nature.
Thomas’ thinking was deeply experiential. He was a disciple of Aristotle. One of my first
teachers in the Order was Giles Hibbert, an eccentric theologian, who was covered with tattoos
which he claimed illustrated Aristotle’s anthropology! Giles taught us that Aristotle was first
of all a marine biologist, who splashed around rock pools, plunging his arms into the water,
touching and feeling the world in all its complexity His was a touchy feely, fingertip
philosophy.
Thomas wrote that ‘there is nothing in the mind which is not first in the senses.’ We know the
world through our skin, as it were. For Aquinas touch is the most human of all the senses. We
can see without being seen, and hear without being heard and, alas, smell without being smelt.
But we cannot touch without being touched, which is why abusive touch is deeply subversive
of our humanity. In the incarnation, humanity feels God’s healing, cherishing touch. Jesus is
the one who touches the untouchables, the lepers and even the dead, whose touch might pollute
one. And Jesus is unafraid to be touched, for example by the woman who is probably a local
prostitute who bursts into the house of Simon the Pharisee and bathes the feet of Jesus with her
tears.’ (Luke 7.44)
Thomas often quoted Aristotle’s phrase: ‘anima est quoad omnia.’ The soul is in a sense
everything. Our knowledge of everything is not abstract and detached. We know things by
becoming them in a sense. This is most obvious in sexual relationships. Adam knows Eve; they
are joined and become one. Dominique Pire was a Belgium Dominican who won the Nobel
Peace Prize after the Second World War. Faced with the alienations and hostilities of the war,
he wrote: ‘One must be ready to fill oneself with the other.’
So Dominic and Thomas had very different lives, but they converge in their search for truth.
This truth is not abstract and inhuman but lived and touched and felt. We need to escape
sometimes from the noise and tumult of our worlds so that we may reflect and ponder. But this
is so that we may open our eyes more keenly to this good, blessed and wounded world which
is our home. Clear sight needs both immersion and retreat, experience and reflection. Some of
us are more apt for one or other; some of us are more like Dominic and others like Thomas.
But in the quest for truth, there is no competition but community. One cannot be a solitary
theologian.
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When the Dominican tradition is strongest we find the same dynamic. In the fourteenth century,
Meister Eckhart and the nuns, and St Catherine of Siena and Blessed Raymond of Capua. But
let’s fast forward almost three hundred years to the West’s first encounter with your neck of
the woods. Here Batolomé de Las Casas is Dominic to Francisco di Vitoria’s Aquinas.
We must set the scene. In 1511, the first small Dominican community in the Americas was
reflecting on the cruel treatment by of the indigenous people by the conquistadors. It was agreed
that Antonio de Montesinos should represent the whole community and preach one of the most
famous sermons in Dominican history, defending the Indians: ‘Tell me, by what right or justice
do you hold these Indians in such cruel and horrible slavery? By what right do you wage such
detestable wars on these people who lived mildly and peacefully in their own lands, where you
have consumed infinite numbers of them with unheard of murders and desolations? ….Are
they not human beings? Do they not have rational souls? Are you not bound to love them as
you love yourselves?’ The Spanish authorities were furious and demanded that Antonio be sent
back to Spain. The Prior replied that when Antonio spoke, the whole community spoke.
The words of these friars led to the conversion of the secular priest Bartolome de Las Casas
and his entry into the Dominican Order. His service of the truth was above all in witnessing to
what was happening. ‘I leave in the Indies Jesus Christ, our God, scourged ad afflicted and
buffeted and crucified, not once but a million times, on the part of all the Spaniards who ruin
and destroy these people…2’
His testimony is like that of St John, what ‘we have heard, and we have seen with our own
eyes; that we have watched and touched with our hands: the Word, who is life.’ (I John 1.1) It
all began when he was nine and he saw Columbus returning to Spain with seven natives from
the Americas. He says; ‘I saw them that day in Seville.’ Later Las Casas recorded in gruesome
detail all the cruelties and injustices which the Spanish committed against the indigenous
people in his Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias which he sent to the King of
Spain. It led to the new laws in 1542 which abolished all native slavery for the first time in
European history, in theory at least. He was the primary witness to the truth of the suffering.
He writes to the Royal Council of Spain of what he has seen, ‘not read in made-up tales, or told
by chattering tongues, but seen with our own eyes, in the presence of our persons.3’
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P.62
Quoted by Gustavo Gutierrez Las Casas: In search of the poor of Jesus Christ New York 1993 p.86
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But Las Casas’ breakthrough was to a deeper truth even than Dominic. He does not just see the
suffering of the Indians, as he calls them; he sees it through their eyes. He becomes them
imaginatively. When people do not get it he often writes, ‘si Indus esset’, ‘if only he were an
Indian’, he would think otherwise.
But as with Dominic, raw experience is not enough. One must think. Above all it was Francisco
di Vitoria was Aquinas to Las Casas’ Dominic. His statue stands outside the United Nations
Commission for Human Rights in Geneva. He first articulated the claim that human rights
belong to all human beings just because they are human. He demonstrated why the Spaniards
had no right to make war on the indigenous people, and he denied the right of the Pope to carve
up the world. He clarified and focused the passionate anger of Las Casas. Without Las Casas,
Vitoria would have been partially blind. Without Vitoria, Las Casas would have been largely
dumb.
And this brings me to the third instance that supports my thesis: Chenu and the worker priests
in France in the 1940s. I arrived at the couvent de St Jacques in Paris in 1973 for a year’s study.
While I was trying to get my bearings an ancient friar came bumbling along, gave me a hug,
pulled my hair, made a joke and wandered off. I thought that it was some poor old Dominican
who had lost his marbles. That evening we had the lecture to open the new academic year, and
it was to be given by the great Marie-Dominique Chenu, one of my heroes. He was the teacher
of Congar, one of the fathers of the Vatican Council, and the theologian of the workers priests.
We all gathered in anticipation, and in came the bumbling old friar. To my horror he went to
the lectern. How embarrassing! I hope that someone would steer him away so that Chenu could
appear. Of course it was Chenu!
For Vitoria, the challenge was the suffering of the indigenous people of the Americas, for
Chenu it was terrible world of the secularised working class of post-war France. Chenu talked
of the need to evangelise ‘an as yet unknown spiritual continent – the world of the worker.4’ It
was a world almost as foreign as the Americas reached by Columbus. Tom O’Meara and Paul
Philibert wrote: ‘The church had never made a serious effort to enter and inhabit the brutalising
world of industrial labour. Tacitly it invited the working classes into parishes that were
essentially a foreign land from their point of view – bourgeois, comfortable and conservative.
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Thomas O’Meara and Paul Philibert Scanning the Signs of the Times : French Dominicans in the Twentieth
Century ATF Theology Adelaide 2013 Loc 793
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For all practical purposes, the church in France had abandoned the working poor and was
unacquainted with and absent from their neighbourhood.5’
So the first challenge was to enter that world. Priests began to dress in civilian clothes and get
jobs in factories and the docks. Eventually there were about one hundred of these worker
priests, of whom twenty were religious and half of those Dominicans. The best known of these
was Jacques Loew. He wrote: ‘In the struggle to get behind this poverty to the people
themselves, there is in fact only one way which so far the sociologists haven’t tried. I concluded
that it was no good wasting time on paper theories. The thing was to buy overalls in an oldclothes market, get a job like everyone else, and then at the end of the way’s work go off and
live with the dregs of the populations – the dockers at the port.6’
This was, in Chenu’s words, a mission of presence. The Church must be there, quietly, often
unobtrusively, sharing the life of these despised people, as God had shared our life. It was an
extension of the Incarnation. But even this largely silent presence required reflection, a
theological exploration if we were to really see what was happening. And the theologians who
accompanied this mission were above all French Dominicans, Chenu, Yves Congar, and HenriMarie Fέret.
And what is so striking is that for Chenu as for Vitoria, Aquinas remained the great master, not
because he had all the answers but because he was unafraid of any questions, and because his
theology is deeply human, experiential.
So this has been a little exposition of our Dominican charism. But what does this mean for your
mission in running Catholic Universities in America, often as the heirs to different religious
orders, each with their own DNA?
First of all: Catholic universities exist not just to help our graduates get a job but to teach them
to serve humanity. Dominic was concerned with the impoverished view of the world of the
Aligensians, and their hatred or the body. Las Casas was grabbed by the suffering of the
indigenous people of the Americas. Chenu was bowled over by the plight of the factory workers
who had lost their faith and often were caught in despair.
What are the great issues of today that might concern your universities? What are the sufferings
of our time? We live in a time of unparalleled migration. Millions of people are displaced by
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6
O’Meara Loc 774
Mission to the Poorest New York 1950 p. 22, quoted by O’Mear Loc 1808
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war and starvation and they are heading to the US and to Western Europe. Germany received
more than a million refugees last year, mainly from the Middle East. There is the desolation of
our inner cities, places like Detroit. Our society is torn apart by vast inequalities. There is the
threat of ecological catastrophe. Perhaps there is the imminent threat of the collapse of our
antibiotics.
Precisely as Catholic universities we need to be present to these sufferings and threats and
know them closely. For example, our students and faculty can experience them by visiting Iraq.
It’s hard to judge what constitutes lunacy and what is reasonable risk. My brethren and I
disagree on this sometimes! But I would hope that our students discover that these suffering
human beings – migrants and refugees, the destitute and prisoners - are flesh of our flesh and
bone of our bone. A Catholic identity challenges every small ethnic or national identity. We
are drowning in the Mediterranean as we flee from Syria or try to trek across the desert to get
to the States. The Jesuit Refugee Service is an admirable expression of this enlarged identity.
Secondly faced with all of this suffering and often discouragement, we do not just offer charity.
In the Catholic tradition, we think; we analyse, we dialogue. Vitoria reflected on the suffering
of the indigenous people in the Americas. What are their rights and how can they be protected?
Chenu and his brother Lebret studied the deprivations of the working classes in industrial
France. Archbishop Helder Camera famously said: “When I give to the poor, they call me a
saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist”.
Being Catholic means that you belong in Christ to all human beings. That is the meaning of the
word, ‘universal.’ We form the young in their Catholicism by teaching them to converse with
those who are different. Good, intelligent conversation breaks through barriers and enables you
to stand in the shoes of another and feel with their skin. Often in our society we are afraid of
those who are different. In years past, communists were feared as subhuman; today some
people want to ban anyone from the States who is Muslim. A professor in Stanford, I think it
was, went to see the Dean to explain a change in his life. Finally he dared to say that he was
undergoing gender realignment. The Dean said: Thank goodness. I thought that you were going
to say that you were becoming a Republican’. Catholic Universities should be places in we
learn to break through barriers, and understand why people think differently from us and how
we can learn from them. A narrow Catholic identity is a contradiction in terms.
All over the world we see the rise of fundamentalism. This is simplistic, reductionist ways of
seeing the world. There is religious fundamentalism, but also scientific and market
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fundamentalism. It is a characteristic of modernity, alas. Faced with the violence of
fundamentalism, I hope that we teach the young to think patiently, profoundly, imaginatively,
and courageously. As Pope John Paul said, we get out of our depths. Duc in altum.
A few years ago, the Dominicans in Baghdad founded the Dominican Academy of Social
sciences. Faced with the fundamentalist violence of Iraq, we wanted to invite people to think.
So we teach politics, economics, psychology, and the scientific study of religion. The symbol
of the academy is the Dominican coat of arms, and a big question mark. All questions are
permitted. 80% of our pupils are Muslims. When I gave a lecture there a year ago, I was deeply
moved by the young Muslim women who just wanted to talk. Not to mention, take selfies!
So the challenge is for the intellectual resources of the university to be in interaction with the
great questions of our day. It should be a school of conversation! This is what Albert the Great,
Thomas’ teacher, called ‘the pleasure of seeking the truth together’7 All disciplines have
something to offer: literature, poetry, history and science. They all help us to be freed from our
small narrow identities and breathe a larger more Catholic atmosphere. Universities are called
to be schools of conversation, and in a good conversation, you never quite know where it will
lead you.
A small final word for those in leadership. Please do not let administration crush the free
creativity of your faculty members. Do not demand of them the endless production of useless
articles that no one will ever read. You are not running production lines. The Catholic thinkers
that we need today should have the courage to think creatively, in ways that may seem a little
crazy at first. The academic world can be very conformist. People who look at things in new
ways, who experiment, can become isolated, lose the chance of tenure, and be denied
publication in peer reviewed journals. But these are the thinkers that we need for the future.
Care for them, encourage them. Let them make mistakes and get things wrong so that one day
they may bless us all by getting things right in ways that we could never have anticipated! The
charism of the congregations who founded our universities is not a straitjacket! Let us inherit
their courage!
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Libr viii Politicorum
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