Today, in the 1962 Dominican Rite Calendar, we commemorate the feast of Blessed Reginald, confessor of the Order of Preachers. The ferial office of Quinquagesima is prayed (Psalm scheme II, preces, proper antiphon at Bened. and Magnif., and prayer from preceding Sunday), 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...