Celebrating a Dominican Jubilee: 800 Years of the Confirmation of the Order of Preachers (2016)
800 Years of the Confirmation of the Order of Preachers
(cf. Acts of the General Chapter (Trogir), n. 40 – 49)
Sent to Preach the Gospel
40. In 2016, we will celebrate the eighth centenary of the confirmation of the Order by Pope Honorius III. A Jubilee for the people of Israel was a time of joy and renewal when "you shall return, every one of you, to your property and every one of you to your family" (Lev 25:10). If our Jubilee invites us to return to the origins of the Order, paradoxically it is so that we will remember how St Dominic sent out his first friars from their house, their family, and their nation so as to discover the joy and freedom of itinerancy. Our mobility means more than moving from one place to another. As disciples of Christ, we are sent to preach the Gospel. By sharing the life of the One who, sent by the Father, breathes out his Spirit upon us, we acquire the interior freedom that alone makes us attentive to the appeals of our human sisters and brothers.
The Charism of Preaching
41. In celebrating eight centuries of existence, we are invited more than ever to laudare, benedicere et praedicare. It is above all God whom we praise for the grace that he gave to Dominic, whose charism of preaching continues to be expressed in and for the world, in medio Ecclesiae. This ministry of preaching that we share with the whole church is still vital and urgent today so that the Gospel may ring out from one end of the world to the other. So this anniversary gives us the occasion to look towards the future, confident in the promises of God who "did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him" (Jn 3:17). Looking to the future, we recognize that we have a lot to learn still about our history, about its moments of shadow and its moments of light, and about the brothers and sisters who went before us among whom were many authentic witnesses to the Kingdom. Our history is a school of truth and humility. It is the source of renewal and hope for the mission of Preachers.
Preaching the Word of God
42. Preaching means making the mystery of the Incarnation present to men and women today. "The Word became flesh" to teach us the Truth of God and the truth about our humanity. To fulfill this service of the Word well, like St Dominic, we have to be seekers of the Truth rooted in the life of Christ. The renewal of our Dominican life begins with the unification of our whole existence through attentive listening to the Word—a life of prayer and contemplation in silence and study. The foundation of our Dominican formation is acquiring a human, spiritual and relational maturity that can bear witness to how the Word of God makes people more fully human and makes our communities of brothers capable of expressing the friendship that God wants to exist among us.
The Demands of Preaching
43. Preparation for our Jubilee also implies a dimension of metanoia or conversion, because our communal and individual lives are shaped by the lifestyles and the opinions around us that we somehow absorb: nihilism, superficiality, addictions and consumerism in the surrounding world, forms of relativism and fundamentalism, a passion to possess, to have power and to look good. All this can infect our Dominican life with individualism and with a bourgeois spirit, with a loss of strength and of the credibility necessary for proclaiming the gospel. More than ever, we need to remember that "faith without works is dead" (Jas 2:17) and as preachers of grace, we have to show by word and example how faith transforms human existence; renews the heart, the spirit, and the body; and how the social realities of the world are called to become signs of the coming of the Kingdom.
The Fruitfulness of Study
44. As we know, St Dominic sent the friars to study in the universities and to be formed there in contact with the new sciences. Today, more than ever, the complexity of the human condition and the major changes that affect people's lives invite us to seek to understand the world in which we live that "God loved so much" (Jn 3:16). Today, St Dominic would send his brothers and sisters to be right in the middle of these transformations so that they could address the questions being posed there and enter into dialogue with those seeking to build a more human world. Nourished by our own traditions, we will be able to bear humble service to the Word of truth, to show how theology is no stranger to any of these contemporary questions, and to offer a biblical and Christian vision of human¬ity, of human dignity, and of the incommensurable value of what is truly human. For us, study is not just a stage in formation but a way of being: it nourishes our whole life and makes it fruitful. Nourished by the Word of God that we must learn to listen to, read, meditate, and study with renewed vigor, we will be able to address the questions of our world that are really just so many new opportunities for Friars Preachers. Indeed our Jubilee gives us the occasion to consider creatively, in cooperation with the nuns, the sisters, and the lay members of the Order, the ways of consecrating ourselves anew to study for the sake of preaching.
A Style of Life
45. Our style of life flows from this personal and communal balancing of study, contemplation, and liturgical prayer, each element enlivening the others. The genius of our founder was to give us flexible, democratic structures of government so that the Order would be able to devote itself entirely to evan¬gelization and address the joys and sorrows, the hopes and fears of people of every age. Our constitutions are a source of liberation, not constraint. Continually modified and renewed in the light of new needs, the constitutions find their basis and their inspiration in the following of Christ. Our laws remind us that Dominican life is lived in community. Their full meaning is seen in their concrete application to our search for fraternal communion, as in the sharing of our goods and of our gifts. St. Albert the Great wrote in this vein: in dulcedine societatis, quaerere veritatem ("in the joy of fraternity, pursue the truth"). Indeed, the pleasure of our fraternal life, and the joy and the forgiveness that we share with one another will constitute our best evangelization in this world wracked with violence, conflict and intolerance. Weren't our first com¬munities called "the holy preaching"?
An Order in Evolution
46. This explains why our Order has been caught up since the General Chapter of Rome in a process of renewal and of structural transformation for the sake of strengthening our preaching mission. This administrative restructuring is not being done for its own sake or to abandon our presence in certain locations. It seeks rather to discern carefully the appropriate structures that will restore the dynamism of our Order in all of its parts and will respond better to the call that St Dominic himself gave to the first friars "to preach, to study, and to found priories."
An Apostolic Life
47. Consequently, the charism that we received from St. Dominic that entrusts us with the task of preaching, since confirmed by the church, requires us to live in the way the apostles lived, "giving testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus" (Acts 4:33). More than ever, it is by devoting ourselves "to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers" (Acts 2:42) that we will be faithful to the prophetic vision of St. Dominic, who wanted an Order entirely consecrated to the preaching of the Word.
Good News for Everybody
48. Sent by Christ "to bring good news to the poor" (Lk 4:18), we are called to enter into the concrete conditions of men and women today in order to share with them a word of hope and of friendship, above all in these times when so many have lost hope for a more human world. Today many people are affected by the results of the worldwide economic, social and moral crisis causing so much vulnerability and intolerance. Our preaching will demonstrate our compassion for those who suffer, bear witness to our solidarity with the socially rejected and with those who live on the fringes of our societies, and speak prophetically to denounce whatever is dehumanizing, above all calling people to a change of mind and heart. Others suffer from social pressures that foster fundamentalism, violence and persecution. Our preaching will be on the lookout for any kind of possible dialogue; it will aim to promote respectful listening to others and ways of speaking that are not confrontational but that humbly seek the truth along with them. Finally, in the context of secularization, our preaching will aim to show how faith gives meaning to life, integrates the person, and puts us in relation to God and to others. Faith opens up an unexpected horizon of human freedom.
"Go to My Brothers and Speak to Them" (Jn 20:17)
49. Celebrating eight centuries of the existence of the Order of Preachers will consist less in commemorating an anniversary than in pushing forward, all of us together enthusiastically, towards the future of our charism. We are confident that the ministry of evangelization will remain a necessity for the church at the service of the world. Indeed, "How beautiful are the feel of those who proclaim peace and who bring good news!" (Rm 10:15) We believe that God has a magnificent plan for the whole human community and that he has chosen us, despite our weaknesses, to be joyful witnesses to his good news.
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