Today,
in the 1962 Dominican Rite Calendar, we celebrate the feast of All Saints of
the Dominican Order. The feast is II
Class and therefore contains a full set of propers. At Lauds, the Psalms of Sunday are
prayed.
How truly humbling it is to be part of a religious Order which includes over 30 saints, 3 Doctor's of the Church, innumerable martyrs and 4 Popes. Not only are these holy men and women, drawn from every station in life, models of sanctity for us, they are powerful intercessors for us before the heavenly throne of our loving God and Father. The litany of the Dominican Saints can be downloaded here.
The
following is an excerpt from “Short Lives of the Dominican Saints” (London,
Kegan Paul, Trench, and Trübner & Co., Ltd., 1901). At the time that this wonderful book was published, the Feast was celebrated on November 9. Also, the number of men and women who had
been “raised to the altars” by Holy Mother Church was significantly fewer than
it is today:
The Church has
instituted the Festival of All Saints, as a well-known spiritual writer tells
us, "first, to give thanks to God
for the graces and crowns of all His elect; secondly, to excite ourselves to a
fervent imitation of their
virtues by considering the holy example of so many faithful servants of God of
all ages, sexes, and
conditions, and by contemplating the inexpressible and eternal bliss which they
already enjoy, and to which
we are invited ; thirdly, to implore the Divine mercy through this multitude of
powerful intercessors; fourthly, to repair any failures Nov. [12] or sloth in
not having duly honored God in His saints on their particular festivals, and to
glorify Him in the saints who are unknown to us, or for whom no particular
festivals are appointed " (Rev. Alban Butler).
Induced by these
same motives, the great religious Orders of the Church have solicited
permission from the Holy See to celebrate an annual festival in honor of those
amongst their children who "have fought the good
fight" here below and are now numbered with the Saints in the Church
Triumphant. This privilege was first
granted to the Benedictines; the Order of Preachers was the next to receive it,
through the Dominican
Cardinal, Vincent Maria Orsini, who obtained this favor of Pope Clement X.,
A.D. 1674. In reply to his
Eminence's petition, the Holy Father is reported to have said: " Rightly,
my Lord Cardinal, ought your Order to
celebrate the solemnity of all its Saints on one appointed day ; for, if we
wished to assign to each of its holy sons his own special feast, we should have
to form a new calendar, and they alone would suffice to fill it."…
Besides those on
whose sanctity the Church has thus set her seal, there are several whose
process of beatification is
already begun in the Sacred Congregation of Rites, and a vast multitude to
whose name popular devotion
habitually attaches the title of Blessed. The General Chapter of Valencia
caused a list to be drawn up of the martyrs of the Order between the years 1234
and 1335, and it was found to contain 13,370 names. In
the sixteenth century alone, 26,000 of the children of Saint Dominic gave their
lives for the faith; and an
author writing in the year 1882 states as an ascertained fact, that, from the
foundation of the Order down
to our own day, there has never been a single decade of years without some
addition to the blood-stained
roll of its martyrs (R. P. H. M. Iweins, O.P. " L'Ordre des
Fr^res-Precheurs." Louvain.) The
century now closing [the 19th] has furnished its quota in the far
East, where the chronicle of the Dominican Mission in Tonquin may be said to be
written in blood.
But there are other
martyrdoms besides that of blood, and who shall reckon up the number of Saint Dominic's children
whose lives have been consumed for the aim and object of his Order, the
salvation of the souls for whom Christ died, in missionary labors, in the
pulpit, the confessional, the professor's chair, the hospital, or the school,
or in the humbler sphere of domestic labor in the service of their Community,
or again in the cloistered seclusion of their Convents, by the secret
crucifixion of the spirit and the holy apostleship of intercessory prayer and
suffering?
It is difficult to
realize the number of those who have worked out their sanctification by the
observance of the Dominican Rule,
but some idea may be formed of the multitude of those who have served God in the white habit of
Saint Dominic by the knowledge that, within thirty years of its foundation, the
Order already reckoned 30,000 members; and when the census was again taken at
the beginning of the eighteenth century, the First or Great Order alone
numbered upwards of 40,000 members. The calamities of the latter part of the
eighteenth century and the proscription of religious institutes in the nineteenth
in countries calling themselves Catholic, have led to a lamentable diminution
in the numbers of the First and Second Orders. The Third Order, on the other
hand, or at least that branch of it which is formed of religious women living
in community, was never so flourishing in numbers or so actively engaged in
works of zeal and charity as in our own day.
To the children of
Saint Dominic, November [12] is a family festival, and the office of the feast
comes as a trumpet-call, reminding them that they are the children of Saints,
as holy Tobias said, and that they must do nothing unworthy of their noble
spiritual lineage, and stirring them up to walk with renewed fervor and fidelity in the
path which their Saints have trodden. No matter whether the lot of Dominicans
be cast in the old historic
lands of Europe, where, under strangely altered conditions of society, they
carry on the same work which was being done by their predecessors in the
thirteenth century; amidst the new and vigorous life of North America ; or in
that Southern half of the same great continent, first evangelized by their Brethren;
in the West Indian Islands, where they are renewing Saint Catharine's heroic
work of tending the lepers; on the plains of Mesopotamia, hallowed by
patriarchal memories, where but yesterday they brought so vast a harvest into
the garners of the Church ; in China and Tonquin, where the soil is still wet with the blood
of their martyrs ; or in far-off South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand,
where they are the pioneers of
their Order they one and all gather in spirit to-day at the feet of their
common Father, congratulating him on the fruits of his labors, and praying
that, through his powerful intercession and that of the Queen of the Most Holy
Rosary, their Mother and Mistress, they too, when this life's pilgrimage is
ended, may be numbered with the Saints in glory everlasting.
Prayer
O God, you have been pleased to enrich the
Order of Preachers with a countless offspring of saints, and have gloriously
crowned in them the heroic merits of every virtue; grant us so to tread in
their steps, that as today we honor them with one solemnity on earth, we may at
length be united with them at the unending festival in heaven. Through our Lord…