How Do You Follow a Founder?

How do you follow a founder? 

That was the question facing Blessed Jordan of Saxony when he was elected to succeed St. Dominic as Master of the Order of Preachers—only two years after Jordan himself had entered the new Order. “I was to be placed over others as their superior,” he wrote, “before I had learned to govern my own imperfection.”

For the last fifteen years of his life, Jordan traveled across Europe, establishing new priories and provinces while regularizing the life of the fledgling Order. It would have been easy for someone in such a position to get caught up in numbers and plans, yet what most deeply impressed those who knew him was Jordan’s capacity for friendship. 

In his Libellus, the earliest history of the Order’s founding, Jordan warmly recalls his friend and mentor Bl. Reginald of Orleans. He devotes a lengthy passage to Bl. Henry of Cologne, whom he calls “my dearest friend in Christ.” Jordan also exchanged dozens of letters with Bl. Diana d’Andalo, a Dominican nun in Bologna, encouraging her and her community even as he drew encouragement from her. 

Whenever Jordan arrived at a Dominican house, it was said, “He would go to the bedside of the sick and cheer them, after which, if there were novices in the house, he would gather them round him and talk familiarly with them, and if any were downcast or beset with temptations he would very soon gladden them.”

Wherever he went, whatever else was happening, Jordan’s whole concern was for the person in front of him. This capacity for friendship is what enabled him to draw so many men to the Dominicans: he is said to have personally received over a thousand novices, making him the patron of Dominican vocations. In Bl. Jordan, we see how human love and friendship are not opposed to the love of God but rather are raised up and perfected by it.

Fr. Jordan DeGuire, OP

(Headline photo by Fr Lawrence Lew, OP, of the east wall of the Chapel of the Immaculate Conception Priory, Washington DC.)