On the Order of Preachers

From a sermon on St. Dominic by Msgr Ronald Knox delivered at St. Dominic's Priory in London on the occasion of the seven hundredth anniversary of the canonisation of St. Dominic.

"We Catholic want more simplicity, more contentment with plain living and with common things, more unworldliness about money and social position, more daily trust in Providence, more honesty of speech, more kindliness towards our fellow men; we want to get away from a great deal of that complexity, that sophistication, that worship of good form, into which the influence of our modern surroundings has led us. We want to restore, somehow, not the outward conditions, but the moral attitude which belonged to the medieval world. It is to the mendicant orders, to you no less than the Franciscans, that we must look if we are to revive that spirit of gaiety which goes with poverty, that open-hearted acceptance of the world which belongs only to those who have learned to despise it. Your continuous tradition must link us with our past, if we are to find refuge from this over-mechanised, over-commercialised age; like a shaft bringing the fresh airs of the sea into a Tube station. Persuade us that the Catholic religion is something more than a mere label, a mere favour that a man can wear on his sleeve; that it is a life, and an interpretation of life; an attitude towards our daily tasks, as well as an attitude towards God.

We expect of you that today you should leaven human thought, by justifying the ways of God to men; by asserting the truth of our Lord's Incarnation, and vindicating the honour of his blessed Mother. We expect of you also that today, you should leaven human society, by showing us in your lives, and in the lives of that great Third Order which derives its inspiration from you, the grand simplicity of former times. So will men learn to find, in the Catholic Church, the key to their disillusionment, and the remedy for their despairs; learning will not do that, argument will not do that. May the prayers of your holy patron, raised so long ago by an infallible oracle to the altars of the Church, win such grace for you and for us; may the bewildered minds of our non-Catholic fellow countrymen be led back, more and more, through the Dominicans to Dominic, and through Dominic to Christ."