From the Dominican Central web site we learn the following about St.
Dominic: he was the founder of the Friar’s Preachers and was born of a
Castilian family. His early years were uneventful. When he was about
twenty-six he became one of the Canon’s regulars, who formed the
cathedral chapter at Osma. In 1206 the turning-point of his life came,
when his bishop, Diego, became unofficial leader of a papal mission to
the heretical Albigenses, who were firmly established in Languedoc. The
bishop chose Dominic as his companion. They lived simply, in poverty,
and undertook discussions with their opponents for which they prepared
very carefully. These methods contrasted with the formality and display
of the official missioners, and a house of nuns founded at Prouille
became the center for the new preachers. The death of Bishop Diego at
the end of 1207 coincided with the murder of the papal legate Peter de
Castelnau by the Albigenses. Pope Innocent III ordered a military
campaign against their leader, Count Raymund of Toulouse. There
followed five years of bloody civil war, massacre, and savagery, during
which Dominic and his few followers persevered in their mission of
converting the Albigenses.
In 1215 Dominic
established his headquarters in Toulouse, and the idea of an order of
preachers began to take shape. They were a body of highly trained
priests, bound by vows with emphasis on poverty, and devoted to the
work of preaching and teaching anywhere and everywhere. The enterprise
was formally approved in Rome in 1216, and in the following year the
founder sent eleven of this brothers, over half the total at that time,
to the University of Paris and to Spain. He himself established
friaries at Bologna and elsewhere in Italy, and traveled tirelessly to
superintend the nascent order, preaching as he went. St. Dominic always
gave importance to the help of women in his work. One of his last
undertakings was to install nuns at San Sisto in Rome. Another was to
send thirteen of his friars to Oxford.
St. Dominic was a man of remarkable attractiveness of character and
broadness of vision. He had the deepest compassion for every sort of
human suffering; he saw the need to use all the resources of human
learning in the service of Christ. His constant reading was St.
Matthew’s gospel, St. Paul’s letters and the Conferences of St. John
Cassian. The order that he founded was a formative factor in the
religious and intellectual life of later medieval Europe. Its diffusion
is now world-wide. This saint was the subject of the song “Domininque”
that was so popular in 1963-4. His emblems are a star and a dog with a
torch in its mouth.