Happy Monday and feast of St. Dominic!

St. Dominic was an extraordinary man of holiness worth knowing about. He was born in 1170 in Spain to a royal family. As a student, he sold books to feed the poor during a famine and even offered himself as a slave to the Moors to ransom a slave. He entered a Benedictine order, and by the age of 25 he was the superior. St. Dominic later formed the Order of Preachers (or Dominicans) to combat the Albigensian heresy.

If you’ve never heard of the Albigensians, much less what they believed, you can thank St. Dominic for being so good at dispelling their false teaching with the light of truth. If you were to ask St. Dominic though, he’d probably give all the credit to Our Lady. Though the Franciscans will deny it, most historians agree that it is to St. Dominic that we owe the gift of the rosary.

As the story goes, in the face of difficulties in preaching against the Albigensian heresy, St. Dominic turned to God in prayer and fasting for help in his heresy-destroying work. After three days of intense prayer, the Virgin Mary appeared to St. Dominic telling him that he must preach her Psalter in order to succeed in defeating the Albigensians. This apparition of Mary to St. Dominic would lead to what we now know as the rosary and their corresponding mysteries. The imagery of Mary handing St. Dominic the rosary is one that many artists have depicted in paintings, too.

To tie this beautiful story of Catholic life into current events, I watched last week a tribute to Vin Scully, the famous Dodgers broadcaster who died recently. As it happens, a friend of mine who’s a huge Dodger fan, gave as a middle name to his first child Vin’s last name. What I did not know was that Vin Scully was also a committed Catholic (which better explains my friend wanting to name his child after him!) Apparently, he also loved the rosary because he recorded himself praying the rosary in his legendary voice. You can find it here: https://watch.formed.org/the-rosary-with-vin-scully

I’m sure St. Dominic would never have thought devotion to the rosary would be so ubiquitous to Catholic life, much less that a baseball announcer would lead it for others over the internet in 2022.

St. Dominic, pray for us. And may Our Lady intercede for Vin to enter paradise.

AMDG, 

Fr. Stephen