Dominican Monks

J. McCabe, Rationalists Encyclopaedia

Dominican Monks. An Order of friars (which means brothers, not monks [see] in the strict sense) founded in 1215 by the Spanish priest Domingo (or St. Dominic) de Guzman. The establishment of the body is evidence alike of the corruption of the older monastic orders, which made a new departure necessary, and of the immense growth of the revolt against Rome—a feature which is overlooked by writers of our time who describe the appearance of Dominic and Francis and their followers as a symptom of the profound piety of the thirteenth century. Dominic had long tried, without success, to convert the Albigensians [see], and he was one of the chief persons to urge the Pope to launch a military crusade against them. His Order was from the start tainted with this inhuman fanaticism against heretics, and his followers, in white robe with a black cloak, observing a modification of the Augustinian Rule, were the worst agents of the Inquisition until their rivals the Franciscans disputed the monopoly. As their Latin name is Dominicani, it was a joke of the Middle Ages to call them the Domini canes ("hounds of the Lord"). Like the later Jesuits, they captured chairs at the universities and won such ornaments as Thomas Aquinas and Albert the Great. Albert records that corruption spread among them (as in the Franciscan Order [see]) long before the end of the thirteenth century. They crossed to England in 1222, but, partly no doubt because England never admitted the Inquisition, they never had the same popularity as the older monks and rival friars. They are unofficially known as "the preaching friars," and the Franciscans as "the mendicant friars." The corruption of the Order is generally said to have been corrected at the Counter-Reformation, but we have an extraordinary picture of their degradation in Italy in the eighteenth century. The learned and virtuous Bishop of Pistoia, Scipio de Ricci, was directed by the Grand Duke of Tuscany to reform his duchy, especially Florence. Ricci found his fiercest opponents in the Dominican monks (who, among other things, used to sleep in the dormitories of the nuns under their charge) and their loose-living General at Rome (Memoirs of Scipio de Ricci, Engl. trans., 1829). Their life to-day is a tedious and half-hearted observance of their antiquated rules, alleviated in England by under-taking the usual pleasant duties of parish priests. Dominic founded also an Order of nuns.

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