Today we celebrate the feast day of St. Dominic. He died in 1221 at the age of fity one. St. Dominic is of course the founder of the Dominican Order.

St. Dominic was a contemporary of St. Francis of Assisi. These two great saints preaching saved many souls and encourage many souls to love God and His Catholic Church above all else.

During the time of these great saints the Church face two great struggles. The Church was at the same time for the most part very rich materially speaking, and very poor intellectually and spiritually speaking. That is so many in the Church were not only very attached to material possessions but even more so had placed their trust in the powers of this world to save them. While at the same time, they were woefully ignorant of the teachings of the Church, and so did not live those teachings in their daily lives in order to merit salvation-they were starving to death spiritually.

And so God raised up two great saints to help the Church of the day, Dominic the great intellectual and preacher of the truths of the faith and Francis the poor friar who called the Church to simplicity of life, trust in God before all else and love of Him above all else. Neumann

I think its important here to state that even though both saints had their own particular charism, both saints, like have all saints, cared for the materially poor; but at the same time, saw that the poorest of the poor were actually those who don’t know the love of God, and His teachings, the teachings of His Church and so don’t place adoration and worship as the primary action of their lives. And these could be both rich or poor materially speaking.


I think one could argue that the crisis of the Church in Dominic’s age and Francis age is very much the same in our age. Our Church, that is her members, so many are very materially rich and spiritually poor. Yes, again so many have much materially speaking, but even more so have placed their trust in the riches of this world to save them…so many have place more of their trust in politics to save our world than in God to save it and us.

And one could argue that we are living in time in which so many Catholics are woefully ignorant of the basic truths of our faith and so of the teachings of the Catholic Church.

The good news is that we too have been given not just two great saintly people to help us as in past, but many saintly people to help us in our current crisis…
such as two of the great intellectuals of all times; Blessed John Paul II and Pope Benedict, who like Dominic have taught us, with a clarity never seen before, the teachings and truths of our Catholic Faith and of the Gospels which are the same thing; These two have called us through their teachings to grow intellectually in the truths of our Beautiful Catholic faith.

And we have been given as well saintly figures such as Blessed Theresa of Calcutta and now Pope Francis who have called us and call us to spiritual poverty, not just a simplicity of life and a detachment from so many material possessions but to a poverty which places our trust in God to save us and our world and returns to making the adoration and worship of Him the one thing that matters most in our lives.

As I said last week during a homily here, St. Francis is many times misinterpreted as the saint who condemned the rich and called all poor people saints. I reminded those listening that St. Francis was the one who call on us to gild our altars with Gold and to use the finest linens available in the Sacred liturgy because by it we show the importance of the worship of God in our lives the primacy of adoration of God over service of the poor. And so we live the first Commandment in proper order..love of God first, love of others next but for love of Him.

So to it seems the same misinterpretation is being made with regards to Pope Francis. He is the Pope of the poor materially speaking who is calling the Church to be stripped of its riches especially with regards to the items it uses in Her liturgical celebrations and stripped of her teachings that go against the modern mentality. .

It seems, this is especially being done by the press who are trying to make Francis into a pope who is going against all of the teachings of the Church. I was recently given an article which purported to give ten quotes of Pope Francis which gave proof of this. Just one of the quotes was the following which proves he focuses on the poor more so than Benedict…who because he wore a golden and jewel encrusted cross compared to Francis’s simple wooden one wasn’t as humble or mindful of the poor…anyway the quote;
"Many people today lack hope. They are perplexed by the questions that present themselves ever more urgently in a confusing world, and they are often uncertain which way to turn for answers. They see poverty and injustice and they long to find solutions. "
"Yet if we refuse to share what we have with the hungry and the poor, we make of our possessions a false god. How many voices in our materialist society tell us that happiness is to be found by acquiring as many possessions and luxuries as we can! But this is to make possessions into a false god. Instead of bringing life, they bring death."

Interestly the article later pointed out that this quote (and the others in the article) wasn’t even made by Pope Francis but actually by Pope Benedict; hence the article actually disproved the assertion that Francis is poor minded and Benedict was the rich minded.

Again, all saintly people, if they are truly saintly, care for the poor materially speaking but all saintly people, saints, also point out that the greatest poverty in our world is ignorance of the truths of our faith which lead to salvation; and the poorest of the poor are then those who don’t know God loves them….and again, these can be very rich or they can be very poor materially speaking.

We must care for those who are materially speaking poor, yes…but even more so, if our world is going to change for the better we must do as both Dominic and Francis did as did Blessed John Paul II and Blessed Mother Theresa of Calcatta, as did Benedict and as is doing Pope Francis we must especially feed intellectually and spiritually those who are ignorant of the truths of our faith which are needed for salvation and we must instill in them the primary necessity of our divine service of the worship of God, if our service to the poor is going to bear the fruit of not just a longer life in this world but the fruit of eternal life in the world to come.

All of these saints and all other saints as well have one other thing in common, their love and devotion to the mother of God. They knew that by it we could convert and so save our world by leading souls away from love and trust in the “riches of this world,” to love and trust in the greatest of riches which is the Son of Mary, Jesus Christ, truly and physically present in the Holy Eucharist the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Altar.
It was the Mother of God herself who gave the powerful Eucharistic prayer of the Most Holy Rosary to St Dominic. “God has never,” said St. Dominic, “refused me what I asked;” and he has left us the Rosary, the we may learn, with Mary’s help, to pray easily and simply in the same holy trust.”