Justice, Peace and Dominicans 1216–1999: X ‐ Looking backwards, forwards and around

Extract

Over the past two years eight people—all of them in one way or another concerned with social justice or peace issues—have written in New Blackfriars about how one very old and in many ways unique Catholic religious order has responded to justice and peace issues in the course of 784 years: the 784 years from its foundation to the end of the Second Millennium. The authors have not set out to write a comprehensive history, but to focus in each article on one individual or group of individuals, placing them in the context of the world they belonged to. Let us start this epilogue by asking ourselves whether we can see in the achievements of these Dominicans any kind of consistent pattern, any recognisable stance—in other words, a distinctively “Dominican” way of reacting to what is going on in society.

This, though, is a question much easier to ask than to answer. Some of you think our choice of subjects has been too esoteric to make an assessment of this kind possible. Of the personalities we have written about, neither Eckhart, Antoninus, Vitoria, Las Casas, nor even McNabb could be called “typical” 14th, 15th, 16th or 20th century Dominicans by any stretch of the imagination. Eckhart’s contemporary, William Humbert, the Inquisitor who in 1310 sent the Beguine mystic Marguerite Porete to the stake, was much more a “typical” 14th-century Dominican than Eckhart, who shared some of his most original thoughts with a throng of Beguine women. One or two of you have also criticised us for not devoting an article to St Thomas Aquinas, surely the Dominican who most profoundly shaped the Dominican way of seeing the world.