ntil
recent times, by a pious belief going back to the fourteenth
century, St. Dominic was credited with organizing a Third
Order of Laity, as if instinctively it seemed desirable
to include the whole People of God in his apostolic intuition.
In the last century Lacordaire wrote in his Life of St.
Dominic (chap. XVI) :
"The
militia of Jesus Christ was the third Order instituted
by St. Dominic, or rather, the third branch of a single
Order, embracing in its wide scope men and women religious
and the laity .... Dominic brought religious life to the
family hearth, to the marriage bed. The world was filled
with young girls, widows, married people, men in every
walk of life, who publicly wore the insignia of a religious
Order and bound themselves to its practices in the privacy
of their homes."
The
description would be valid for the end of the thirteenth
century, the period to which historians ascribe groups
of lay people who truly could be called Dominicans.
Actually,
the Order of Preachers was linked with the laity from
its very inception, in a quite natural way, by reason
of its establishment in cities. It always made room for
them. We find many instances of this in accounts of the
early days of the Order: at Cologne, for example, where
Brother Henry was Prior (The Beginnings, 79 85), or again
at Bologna in the neighborhood of the monastery of St.
Agnes. Jordan in one of his letters greets Diana d'Andalo
"and the ladies and friends of the community".
16
Pursuing
its apostolic thrust, the Order of Preachers was bound
to encounter the evangelical movement of the laity who,
in Italy, had organized themselves into an Order of Penance.
These lay groups, divided into local fraternities, addressed
their spiritual needs to the new, contemporary mendicant
orders. According to their affinities and the orientation
of their spirituality, members would wear a gray mantle
if associated with the Friars Minor, black if they frequented
the Dominicans.
It
was not until 1285 that the Master General of the Preachers,
Munio of Zamora, invited the "black" penitents
to place themselves under his jurisdiction. They were
given a Rule and a Dominican director, and confraternities
had their own priors. "The Order wished to take the
responsibility for this lay branch so as to realize the
great hope of lay movements, heretofore always disappointed:
evangelical proselytism."17
With
this in view the penitents, who up until then, through
humility and as an example, had followed the life style
of repentant sinners and had devoted themselves to works
of charity, were to bear witness to a love of truth proper
to the Order of Preachers in the thirteenth century. Munio
of Zamora's rule makes this clear in unequivocal terms:
"Let them excel in virtue and guard their reputation.
Let them in no way leave themselves open to suspicion
of heresy, but on the contrary be true sons of St. Dominic
in the Lord, filled to the utmost with strong and ardent
zeal for Catholic truth, in ways in keeping with their
own life."18
The
laity were here being given an ecclesiastical mission,
were being placed at the service of the preaching of truth
"in accordance with their own life". Their activities
would vary greatly through the centuries; they would be
called confraternities, militia or societies. Some communities
would live under a rule without being bound to enclosure.
Such would be the case with the mystical mantellata, Catherine
Benincasa. The Third Order Regulars would gradually learn
how to share in the Dominican grace of preaching through
works of charity and also, in a privileged way, through
teaching.
We
have no difficulty in admitting that, in his lifetime,
Dominic could not have foreseen all the forms of life
that would flow from his intuition in the founding of
the Order of Preachers. No ancestor can imagine his progeny.
Dominic's friend Gregory IX, in the Bull of Canonization
for Dominic, indeed foresaw that like the Orders of Citeaux
and Flora under St. Bernard, the Friars Minor and the
Preachers would draw after them "legions of brethren".
Preaching the gospel of Christ, wholly devoted to the
Word of God, "Dominic engendered a great number of
sons" (1 Cor 4:15).'9
The
fruitfulness of the grace of preaching gave birth to innumerable
branches through the course of history, all of them dependent,
by reason of their service to the apostolic mission, upon
the center, the Church. With his brothers, his nuns, and
the laity, the Dominican family, whose name is declined
in the plural, responds to the broad invitation of the
Apostle: "We ought to support such men, that we may
be fellow workers in the truth" (1 Jn 8). 
(Source
: Bedouelle, Guy. Saint Dominic. The Grace of the Word.
Ignatius. 1987.)
