This homily was preached on the solemnity of St Dominic during the parish visitation by the Most Reverend Peter Comensoli, Archbishop of Melbourne.
This morning, right at this very moment, the worst fears of some of our forebears are being confirmed. When we were founded in the thirteenth century, on hearing that an order of preachers had been founded, some supposed that it was an order of bishops. And so, someone who preaches in the presence of a bishop as I am today must be a … well, St Dominic found a better way to finish that sentence.
We can forget how different parish life has become because of seminaries. Compared with the long history of the priesthood, we might say they’re only a few centuries old. To us here in Camberwell, seminaries can seem strange things indeed. From the vantage point of our cloister, they look like colleges of temporary monastics. But they serve the important purpose of educating and forming future priests, thereby preventing the situation of the thirteenth and other centuries when only prelates preached.
So now that we have a well-educated diocesan clergy and preaching happens in every parish, ought we to say that the seminary has squashed the priory? What purpose is there for St Dominic’s preachers with the advent of the educated priest?
Our Dominic’s preachers were given the task of meeting the threat of heresy, which arises whenever ignorance of divine revelation does. Distortions about our faith in God, creation, and ourselves are indeed a threat, precisely to happiness. When have wrong ideas in our heads, we become enslaved to misery: God is good and so is his creation, including us, and our descent into sin meant creation was where God poured himself out to redeem us, in the Person of his Son.
St Dominic was not as concerned with the care of souls as he was with their salvation. His notion of a friar is someone who teaches, corrects, and confirms right faith before setting off elsewhere. We know practically nothing of Dominic's exercise of the priesthood and so much about his preaching. His vocation and ours is to find and prepare people for the sacrifice first by preaching. In this, we follow the Lord’s own example: he preached the kingdom before he sealed the covenant, and through the blood of the covenant all who have gone astray can find the kingdom again through the sacred preaching.
All through our saint’s life and our own, we’re shown the importance of the ministry of the word, a sharing in the prophetic office of the bishops. There is a service of the one faith to be made, a cult of the living text to be performed, a following of Christ to be done in obedience, poverty, and chastity. The Word must be ministered to in study and prayer, and administered in witness and sound teaching. The Word himself must be served by us. He is our contemplation.
May the Lord hear St Dominic’s best prayers for us, that we shall serve the word to our people. May St Dominic obtain for us all the graces we need to be faithful and find in the word our life’s purpose.
Fr Paul Rowse, OP
Parish Priest
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