The Black Friars in Wales

A well-known picture by Fra Angelico shows the meeting at Rome, in the year 1216, of St Francis and St Dominic. They were men of very different experience and temperament; yet they were one in heart; and between them they gave to Christianity a new form of apostolic ministry that still, over 700 years later, is operative in the world. Francis and Dominic were the founders of the friars. And a friar-the word simply means 'brother'-a friar is one who combines elements of the earlier monasticism-its dedicatory vows, its communal life, its daily round of praise of God in church-with the manifold works of the pastoral ministry. For the friar, contemplation of divine things issues in activity outside his monastery: he is, as it were, both monk and missioner-'revivalist', if you like . . . Dominic was a Spaniard by birth; and in the south of France in the early years of the thirteenth century he was faced with the ravages of a doctrine that was both false in the abstract and vicious and anti-social in practice. Moved by intense compassion for those who erred in ignorance, he saw that what was wanted was intelligent presentation of the truths of Christian faith by men who lived really in accordance with those truths-a real ministry of the word and of example. And so he brought into being the Order of Preachers or Black Friars

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