PREACHING O.P.

José Luis de Miguel, O.P.

 1. PREACHING O.P.
 Our “raison d’être” (reason to be) our Mission.
 O(rdo) P(raedicatorum): Brothers, Sisters, Lay men/women: Preachers.
“The Order of Preachers, founded by Saint Dominic, is known to have been established from
the beginning, for preaching and the salvation of souls, especifially” (LCO Prologue).
 Our identity: “Praedicatores”, not only “Praedicantes”.
 Our first priority…
 Our vocation, and our mission: “Preaching for the salvation of souls
(people)”…
 2. PREACHING OP
Listening to God: “Before God”

Preaching is a Drama In four acts:

 Listening  Our God is a God who speaks: “Shema, Israel”, (Dt 6,4) “The Lord said to me…”
 Israel is the “People of the ear”, of the listening.
 The preacher, the Prophet has not been called to preach his word, but the word entrusted
to him: “Go and tell my people what you have seen and heard”.
 Listening – “audire”- and obeying – “ob-audire”- is the same term to say “listen”, “hear”,
“adhere to your heart”.
 “Speak, Lord, your servant is listening” (1 Sam. 3,9)

Teaching
 Proclaiming
 Interpreting
 3. PREACHING OP
Listening to God: “Before God” (3)

 First moment of preaching: pre-meditation. The “orator” becomes the “ad-orator”

 Before an “in-vocation”, our prayer is a “con-vocation” made by God (He calls first).
 Before we search for Him, He looked for us…

 Encounter between an “I” and an “you”, a dialogue.

 In order to be able to proclaim “thus says the Lord”, “This is the word of God”, the preacher must
dedicate long and intensive moments of prayer, to listen/talk to the Lord.
 In the encounter confidence is needed: only then the possibility of an alliance will be
given.
 God takes always the initiative: He risks our refusal, but respects our freedom…
 4.PREACHING OP
Listening to God: “Before God” (3)

Silence:
 The preacher needs to be a “child of silence”, for silence is, as it is said, “pater praedicatorum”,
the “Father of Preachers”.
 Free option to enter into our own interiority and in the otherness.
 Exterior: starting point to communicate with the other. Not just passive, or repressive, that
simply close the person in her loneliness, and impedes relationship, communication.
 Interior: alien to all “noises” that sometimes dwell inside; the interior disorder…
 As a space to “read” the truth about ourselves.
 As an implicit confession of our own radical poverty... “you are the one who is not, I am he who
is” (Jesus to Catherine of Siena)
 “The silence of the believer is always an “accompanied” silence” (Fernando Fuentes, OP).
 Silence, to talk afterwards not only about God, but in the name of God.
 5. PREACHING OP
Listening to God: “Before God” (4)

 Word: “The only word that anyone of us can preach is the word that has been born
within ourselves, the word that we have heard in the depth of our being”. (Meister
Eckhart, OP)

Silence is the birthplace of the Word, it is waiting for something to come, for an
event.

“Silence is the place wherefrom things come to life, as a child comes to life after nine months of
silence… We enter into life and into silence after long spaces of silence” (Lavigne, OP)

If we have not reached the most intimate of us through silence, there will be no word. There will
be only discourse.

God legitimizes our words, makes them his own. The words that encounter us in silence, lightened
by the Spirit of God, become a true “sacramental”.
 6. PREACHING OP
Listening to the others: “For men/women”
 Listening to God often passes through the “others” (Mt 25, 40).
 Preaching is to relate the gospel to the life of the people: answer to the questions
they pose, share their pains and sadness… (Gaudium et Spes,1), and to illumine
their lives at he light of the Gospel
Biblically, our listening, study, etc., are communitarian, ecclesial-oriented
towards our neighbors. That is why true reading of the Bible can be, at the
same time, “solitary” and “solidary”.
Preachers must share out silence or word, as bread is shared at the table…
 Concrete, historical, of today, with: a) name and surname, b) face and culture, c)
aspirations and problems, d) greatness and poverties…
 7. PREACHING OP
Listening to others: “For men/women”(2)
 “Presence in reality”: attentive, exigent, active. He must possess the “sense of truth and of
things”…, the “truth of man”, and the “truth of God”(V. de Couesnongle, OP)

 Attentive to the “newness of God”:

• context, differences: he must have a “fine ear” that listens attentively to the pass of God by every
day’s reality, and “a heart that understands” (1 Re 3,9).
• “The book of life and the love of God” [the cross] (Gerard Frachet, OP)

 “Contemplative of the street”, the radio, television, Internet, ... Know how to re-actualize
the look of Jesus over money, injustices, power, hatred: “Who is Magdalene, Zacchaeus, the
Publicans, the Pharisees…”? (V. de Couesnongle, OP),
 8. PREACHING OP
Actualization of God’s Word
 Preaching must “actualize what is eternal and make eternal, so to speak, what
is actual” (Alexandre Vinet).
 To be a preacher (man or woman) is to know that God’s Word has been
entrusted to me to pass it on to others. It is to feel the urgency to speak the
word of truth, love, mercy and justice, received from God in Christ Jesus: “…
how terrible it would be for me if I did not preach the gospel!”(1 Cor 9,16).
Even if I feel incapable, or sinner…
 Multifaceted: not only from the “pulpit”, but from where people are,
especially in the “new places”: of preaching, The “new areopaghi”.
 Preaching of the whole OP Family…All its members, as the “sancta
praedicatio” in the beginning, or the Community at “La Hispaniola”.
 9. PREACHING OP
Actualization of God’s Word (2)
 The “drama in four verbs” of preaching has its parallel in the “drama in four
verbs”, that introduces the Last Supper: “gave thanks”…”took it”…, “broke it”
and “distributed it”.
 Giving thanks is to pray: the first step of listening of the authentic preaching,
 Take is teaching, to handle, carry a text into your own hand, in an honest,
exigent and bright approach.
 To break is proclaim the gospel, with its forgotten answers and its breakups
[ruptures].
 Distribute is to share the gospel, a question that pertains to all without
distinction, preachers and hearers” (L. Gagnebin)
 10. PREACHING OP
Novelty
Specific contribution of the OP’s preaching to the Church
 Newness of the Dominican Preaching
“The kind of preaching for which Dominic founded his Order deserves truly the name we
give it of ‘New Preaching’” (H. M. Vicaire, OP).

 Accompanied by the testimony of life:

-“Apostolic life” that guarantied its preaching inspired in the gospel. They were not
the first who united “word” and “life”. Their novelty was to install, in 1206, this preaching
in the heart of an official action of the hierarchy.

-“Evangelical poverty”, supported directly by the Pope, who delegates to the

Order the power to confer to its members the “officium praedicationis”.
 11. PREACHING OP
Novelty (2)
 With guarantee of stability:
 “Itinerant”: liberty and mobility…
 Carried out from a community, called “domus praedicationis” [House of Preaching”…
 Kerigmatic orientation:
 It is not limited to the defense of the orthodoxy, or to refute heresy, or just teach the
“regula fidei”, inculcating “good customs”… It assumes, already in 1215, “the preaching
of the evangelical truth” and the “evangelization of the Word of God” everywhere,
according to the Council of Letran IV” (H. M. Vicaire, OP)
 The Gospel provided: a) the content, b) the form, c) the way of their preaching.
 Universal dimension, missionary:
Not only to the territory of heretics, as until now, but to all the Christian Community, and even
beyond the frontiers of Christianity to the unknown (Mt 28, 16-19).
 12. PREACHING OP
Novelty (3)
 Ecclesial: “in medio Ecclesiae”:
Not only:
 authorized and supported by the hierarchy, but
 carried out from the heart of the Church, and
 in her name.
“Dominic founds his Order to serve the catholicity of the Church, distributing his friars
‘throughout the different parts of the Church of God”(Jordan of Saxony, OP), and placing them at
the service of the unity of the Church, from a center of operations.
 With the freedom of a son of the Church.
Even if he not always agreed with all that was taking place inside her. Dominic’s is a “prophetic
presence”, that does not hide, when it is necessary, the denunciation, even if it is painful, but
makes it with love and pain, “from inside”. He asks his brethren “not to put their cry in heaven”(not
to take up the fight against bishops and the hierarchy…).
 13. PREACHING OP
The Dominican Preacher’s attitude
 The attitude of all preachers is to imitate, as closely as possible, the manner of
preaching of Jesus…
 To use “preaching” adjectivally –”Dominican”- only seeks to go deeper into the
soul of those, men and women, clerics and lay people, who dedicate their lives to
emulate Jesus, in order to continue the mission entrusted to them by the Spirit.
 We’ll let ourselves be enlightened by one of our most prominent preachers ever,
Bartolomé de Las Casas, OP, “for it is not a question of just announcing the
Word of God; we must try to make the other understand and accept it as such;
that the other can read the intentions of the apostle, and that they are right”(B.de
Las Casas, OP)
 14. PREACHING OP
…Attitude (2)
 Present the Word as a service, a gift, a grace. The preacher is a “servant”, an
instrument of the Word. The word we preach does not belong to us:
renunciation to the ambition of power.
It is not a question of an opportunistic, political strategy. It is an exigency of
evangelization, carried out from an attitude of service and evangelical poverty.
 Gratuity. The Word is a gratuitous gift of God for his people (Mt 10, 8), it is
not a commercial article: renunciation to he ambition of richness.
St. Paul did not seek the goods of those to whom he preached, but they
themselves (Phil. 4,17; 2 Cor 12,14).
 15. PREACHING OP
…Attitude (3)
 Kindness, warm welcome. In an attitude of meekness,
gentleness… To make oneself all for all…

“At times the preacher must, as Las Casas, confront and

denounce injustices, but only so that life may come out
victorious over death, and the Resurrection over the tomb,
and praise over denunctiation”. (T. Radcliffe,OP).

 Love of charity: abiding by “the only law”.

The preacher must live that “law”, that leads him to reflect
the face of God ( 2 Cor 3,18). That is his best preaching,
and his glory…

Leo Zender, Orthodox theologian, said of Fr. Congar: “I saw

in you St. Dominic’s icon!” And in his availability, Dominic
was certainly an icon of Jesus.
 16. PREACHING OP
… Attitude (4)
 An exemplary life: harmony between word and life.
That is, Las Casas says, “the most convincing syllogism”. “The apostles taught
first with their lives and then with their words. And they had very little need of
words, since their lives were the ones that were preaching” (B. de Las Casas,
OP)
“When St. Dominic met the Papal Legates, they all brought with them the same
words, gospel words. But when the Legates pronounced them they were
empty” (T. Radcliffe, OP)
El preacher must be a living word of life and hope (cf 2 Cor 3,3). At times, the
most effective word may be silence. “[Their testimony of life] was one of the
most important motives that induced many masters and students to enter the
new Order. The life and the preaching of the friars were the most efficacious
vocational promotion” (Felicísimo Martínez, OP)
 17. PREACHING OP
Characteristics of Dominican Preaching
 Kerigmatic: “in Christ God saves us”.
It is: a) based on Sacred Scripture, b) on the announcement of the Good News
of salvation and c) on the experience of their faith in Christ.
“The sons of Dominic love to find in Scripture the types and symbols of their
vocation… The gospel provides them the matter and form and the way of their
preaching” (H.M. Vicaire, OP)
 It is not moralistic nor exhortative…
 It has: a) positive nature, b) is “doctrinal” (born in contemplation and the
study of the Word of God), and c) more “gracious” than voluntaristic,
threatening, etc.
 18. PREACHING OP
Characteristics… (2)
Charismatic: a “gift” conferred by God, then:
 backed by the Spirit,
 the efficacy of the Word of God, and by
 the life of the preacher.
Prophetic: of open eyes… Eyes to see and ears to
listen to the people, then make a theological reading
from God.

The Prophet:

 Reads the events, the signs of the times, at the light

of the Word and the experience of God:
 Looks from afar, but without moving far away…
 Adopts a critical (not hypercritical!) attitude towards
 reality, from the Word of God and his plan of salvation,
Reads the word of God at the light of the historical
happenings (“historia salvationis”)
 19. PREACHING OP
Characteristics…(3)
Denounces those situations and actions that go against God’s salvific plan: “to know God is to make justice”.
He says those things that must be said, even if they are hard, but he does not do it harshly: “fortiter in re, suaviter in
modo” [with firmness regarding its content, but with delicacy in the way to say them], with charity.
Itinerant: “The preaching that travels the whole world”.

That makes it possible to move to new frontiers, beyond the narrow limits of the priory, the parish, diocese, even the
Local Church… to the whole world; “light of luggage”, and “free heart”, without attachments to persons, things or
houses, which eventually may hinder them from “going”, flying. (Cf. Chapter of Rome, 1983, 97).
Also the institutions must be in function of the preaching mission, a kind of “residential itinerancy”. “A way of
seeing the convent in terms of preaching, not the other way round, conditioning preaching to the pre-established
residence, to the friars or the monumental buildings from which it would be sad to depart…” (Juan Manuel Pérez,
OP)
 20. PREACHING OP
Characteristics….(4)
The abandonment to God’s Providence was for Dominic a
source of real joy, typical of the itinerant, mendicant
preachers. Hence, the strong impact of the first communities
of brothers and sisters, changed into true “domi
praedicationis”, “houses of preaching”.
 21. PREACING OP
Characteristics… (5)
At the frontiers: Who are my Cumans?

Without discrimination of any kind, but taking

side with the needy. Seeking our “frontiers”
and assuming their challenge.

Our “Frontiers” aren’t geographical boundaries.

Regarding that dimension the Dominican
project is an ideal, a mission without frontiers.
To reach our frontiers we don’t need to take a
long journey: they are just there, in the very
society where we live. Our task is, as it was that
of Dominic, to discover them…
 22. PREACHING OP
Characteristics (6) [Present day frontiers]
 The frontier between life and death. The challenge of Justice and Peace in the world:
poverty, injustice, violence, war, death…
 The frontier between humanity and inhumanity. The challenge of the marginalized:
some ethnic groups, emigrants, displaced persons, workers, women, young people, third age…
 The frontier of religious experience. Secular, anthropocentric ideologies,
indifferentism, individualism, practical atheism, consumerism, pragmatism, materialism…,
idols all of them on whose altar the person’s most noble values are sacrified.
 The Frontier of the Church. The challenge of non Catholic confessions, the
sects, the plurality of Christian confessions, “scandal for believers and non
believers”…
All these frontiers are an invitation and an opportunity to us, Dominicans,
to be attentive to the “new places of preaching”, new “areopagi” that are
becoming necessary. They are also our “priorities”!
 23. PREACHING OP
Characteristics (7) [Present day frontiers]
To discover these challenges, we must listen to the “signs of the times” and inculcate in everyone of us and of our
communities attitudes of:
 A total openness to truth, wherever it is found.

 A deep compassion towards people,

especially toward those who are at the
margins of the human community.

 Availability to go wherever the word of truth

may call us.

 Intensification of our prophetic spirit.

 Profound sensitivity towards the diverse
visions of reality of other religions, cultures,
etc.
 Work in common (Cf. Act. Gen. Ch., Ávila
(1986)Ch. II, I-II).

“In dulcedine communitatis veritatem

quaerere” (St. Albert the Great, OP)
 24. PREACHING OP
Characteristics (8)
 Compassionate: “God’s sigh” – The preachers’ “Cries”.
• Compassion is at the root of the evangelical preaching: we are preachers of a
gospel of mercy: “God so loved the world… (Jn 3,16-17).
• “Historia salvationis” is simultaneously “historia compassionis”. God “sees” the
situation of his people, and he “shudders and is touched to mercy” [se “estremece
y se “enternece”]; “his heart ‘breaks’ with pater/maternal care” (Ex 3,7-10).
 Jesus’ “cries”:
 Over Jerusalem (Lk 13: 34),
 By the Lake (Mk 6:34),
 at Sicar’s well of Jacob (Jn 4:10),
 On the cross (Lk 23:34)
 25. PREACHING OP
Characteristics (9)
St Dominic feels such a compassion for the others that
his apostolic heart cries out with pain (J.of Saxony,OP).
 St Dominic’s “cries”:
 AtPalencia: “I do not want to study in dead skins while
people starve”. He was moved to compassion…

 The “cry of Tolouse”, at the Inn: “Burning in his interior

out of his feeling of compassion”(J.of Saxony,OP,“Libellus”).
 “Dear God: What will happen with sinners?
 "I am going off to the Cumans”…
 The “cries”at La Hispaniola (Dominican Republic):
“These, aren’t they men?” (Antón de Montesinos, OP)
 “The Indians die before their time!” (Bartolomé de Las Casas, OP)
 26. PREACHING OP
It is our “Trade Mark”
Our world offers a pitiful scenario of injustice, oppression, poverty, and
suffering. The “inhuman and anti-evangelical poverty” is still the
situation in which millions of our brothers and sisters live. “They are
anonymous, they have no name, they are only one number” (G.
Gutiérrez, OP). Even more, at times they don’t count any more, they are
dispensable, disposable…
In this challenging situation, how to announce today, how to say “Thy
kingdom come”? How to tell our helpless brethren “God loves you?”
And yet, that is the nucleus, and at a last instance, the only thing that
we all and always must preach: “Your Kingdom come!”, “God loves
you!”.
 27. PREACHING OP
To reach evangelical compassion, one must first experience God’s
compassion towards oneself. Only then can we see other people
through the same prism of God, and will realize that, more than
“good” or “evil”, people “see” or “do not see” (Cf. Jn 9:1-17; Mt 20:
29-33; Mk 10: 46-52). God loves us with and despite of our blindness.
But He can not endure the evil of which we, his children, are victims.
 God’s love is a gratuitous love: He loved us first, without any
merit on our part. Just because He is compassionate and
merciful… Who among us does not want to be loved
gratuitously?...
“It is a question of our trade mark. We have been created
gratuitously and that is the greatest aspiration we have” (G.
Gutiérrez, OP)
 28. PREACHING OP

Compassion is, at the same time, the clearest sign of identification with God, and a sign of human plenitude in that
which the person has of more noble. “We need a formation on compassion, an education of our heart and our mind to
break all that in us is of stone heart, arrogance and critique” (T. Radcliffe, OP).
We, Dominicans, need this formation, because we need to “announce the Good News to the poor”, after the
manner of Jesus of Nazareth, Dominic of Guzmán, Thomas Aquinas, Catherine of Siena, Vincent Ferrer, G.
Savonarola, A. Montesinos, B. de Las Casas, Louis Joseph Lebret, M. Joseph Lagrange, Gustavo Gutiérrez…, with
shudder, tenderness and commotion, because “I saw my people’s affliction…”.