Today,
in the 1962 Dominican Rite Calendar, we commemorate the feast of Blessed Reginald,
confessor of the Order of Preachers. The
ferial office is prayed, and the commemoration is made at Lauds and Vespers
with the propers given in the Proper of the Saints.
From
the Martyrology:
At Paris, Blessed Reginald, confessor. He was dean of the Church of St. Aignan in Orleans. While at Rome, he received from the hands of our holy Father Dominic, the Dominican habit which the glorious Virgin Mary had shown him a short time before when he was dangerously ill.
From “Short Lives of the Dominican Saints” (London, Kegan Paul, Trench, and Trübner & Co., Ltd., 1901):
The remaining events of Blessed Reginald's brief but
brilliant career must be summed up in a few words. After his clothing, he
departed for the Holy Land, and on his return, after founding a Convent in
Sicily, he ruled the Order as Vicar whilst Saint Dominic visited Spain. At the
same time he assumed the government of the Convent of Bologna, where, within
six months, he received more than a hundred members into the Order, many of
them men of great learning and distinction; so that it came to be a common
saying that it was scarce safe to go and hear Master Reginald if you did not
wish to take the Friars' habit. The great talents and success of Blessed
Reginald induced Saint Dominic to remove him to Paris, to the great sorrow of
his Brethren; for, notwithstanding the severity of his discipline, they were
tenderly attached to their saintly Prior and wept as though being torn from
their mother's arms.
At Paris, his burning eloquence drew all to hear him and
vocations to the Order were as striking as at Bologna. Being one day asked how
he, who had been used to so luxurious a life in the world, had found it
possible to persevere in the penitential life of the Order, Reginald humbly
cast his eyes upon the ground and replied, "Truly I do not think to merit anything
for that before the tribunal of God. He has given me so much consolation in my
soul, that the rigors of which you speak have become very sweet and easy to
me."
One of the most remarkable subjects whom he drew to the
Order was Blessed Jordan of Saxony, to whom God was pleased to reveal the approaching
death of Reginald in a vision, wherein he beheld a clear and sparkling fountain
suddenly spring up in the Dominican Church of Saint James, and as suddenly
fail.
The death of the holy man took place in February, A.D. 1
220, when he had worn the habit scarcely two years. When Abbot Matthew (Matthew
was the only one who ever bore the title of Abbot in the Order; the Superiors
of houses have always been called Priors), who then governed the Community at
Paris, came to announce to him that his illness was mortal and proposed to
administer to him the Sacrament of Extreme Unction, the dying man made answer,
"I do not fear the assault of death, since the blessed hands of Mary
anointed me in Rome. Nevertheless,
because I would not make light of the Church's Sacrament, I will receive it,
and humbly ask that it may be given to me."
Blessed Reginald has ever been held in veneration in the
Order, though he was not solemnly beatified until the pontificate of Pius IX.
Prayer
O God, you gave your blessed confessor Reginald into the special protection of your most holy Mother; grant, by his merits and prayers, that we may always be protected by the help of that same glorious Mary, ever virgin. For you live and reign...