This article grows out of recent discussions within the International Council of Lay Dominican Fraternities (ICLDF) on the mission of Justice and Peace in the life of Lay Dominicans. Writing as International Coordinator, Sébastien Milazzo offers his reflection on how care for the poor belongs at the heart of Dominican identity.
I would like to share with you a few points, as coordinator of the ICLDF, about the impact of the work of Justice and Peace. This is not meant to be a formal lecture, but just a few free reflections.
First, I will try to position the Dominican laity in relation to Justice and Peace, from the perspective of our institutional culture.
Second, I will try to offer some tips—as young people say on Instagram—that might help us reinterpret our actions for Justice and Peace in the light of theology.
I. Justice and Peace in the Institutional Culture of the Lay Dominican Life
With nearly 133,000 Lay Dominicans in the world — an increase of 3,500 members in just three years — one can say that the Lay Dominican body is one of the most lively forces, not only in the Order of Preachers but in the whole Catholic Church: and what social and professional competencies are found among you! Enough to create many thematic networks on issues that concern us!
But growth in numbers is nothing compared to the mystery that dwells in so many men and women desirous of following Christ in the footsteps of Saint Dominic, in a mendicant Order. By “mendicant,” I mean the capacity we have to live in a joyful and fruitful sobriety: this joyful and fruitful sobriety tends to refuse, like the mendicant Orders (Dominicans, Franciscans, Augustinians, Carmelites), all forms of worldliness, including ecclesiastical worldliness.
We do not become Dominicans to build a career, but to serve — especially the most vulnerable, who are, perhaps with regard to structures, “on the peripheries of the Church” as Pope Francis reminds us, but who, in Christ’s view, are the heart of the Church in which His heart beats: in fact, the apostles themselves were wounded or broken limbs, but they did not wait to be perfect to follow Christ and be alive.
This joyful sobriety is prophetic, today more than ever: it runs counter to perfectionism, to propriety, to consumerism that penetrates even into the intimate, relational, and existential spheres of the person. It opposes a post-industrial society that tends to segment a person’s life into work, married life, family life, friendship life, and social life: this is a crucial issue which we often underrate.
The fragmentation of life is certainly made possible by social structures, but we too often forget the impact of such fragmentation in the existential direction of each person, even on mental health. It is, I dare say, the mystery of evil in all its darkness that is expressed there: when a person doubts their dignity — which is intrinsic — because structures have contributed to fragment their life so severely that they no longer know who they are and do not know which choice to make, that is a tragedy, a tragedy that touches as much the juridical-social structures as the very meaning of existence.
Yet law’s purpose is to make the person exist in dignity, not to fragment or even annihilate it. So, following Saint Thomas Aquinas, let us prefer enlightening to merely shining. And in all those sectors of our life, we are called to remain deeply unified and not to play differentiated — and sometimes contradictory — roles depending on the tasks we must accomplish. It is a major existential challenge. To be a good Christian, a good Dominican, you must be alive: and it is only by being deeply alive — without a “Lenten mask” — that we can share the devouring fire of the Holy Preaching. Christianity is a vitalism: that is a necessary argument for the struggle against every form of poverty.
The sociology of the Lay Dominican Life inscribes within its very DNA the challenges of Justice and Peace: our social composition is very diversified; that is, in my view, a sign of an authentic communion, and not of convenience or a convergence of special interests.
Only in the Order is it possible to meet a distinguished member of a minister’s cabinet and an unemployed person doing the dishes together and laughing together during a retreat: they are brothers and sisters on equal footing, without feelings of superiority or inferiority. This social mix is prophetic insofar as it breaks the chains of alienation in a world where status, salary, and appearance alone remain reference points in social interactions: our free relationships among brothers and sisters is the ferment of an authentic and real communion.
The freedom in relationships in such a diversified social body is a guarantee of better understanding the challenges concerning human and social rights today: it is in our fraternities that we learn to become brothers of all, in word and example. We already concretely learn solidarity in our fraternities. To better express it outside, for charity cannot be confined to a group: it traverses the world.
We are resolutely turned toward apostolate among the poorest: time is short to list what is happening in each province or in each fraternity. But one can give some items of these apostolates: social and housing rights, the prison world, the health sector, education and university world, professional insertion are as many poles of activity that recur.
Just last week, during the General Assembly of COFALC, I met a young Argentinian doctor specialized in palliative care who, moreover, carries out apostolic work in a retirement home: essentially, our lay condition and our professional skills allow us to instill more words and actions of Justice and Peace.
However, our institutional culture is improvable with regard to Justice and Peace. In this sense, the ICLDF has expressed the wish that each regional council (ECLDF, COFALC, North America, Africa, Asia-Pacific) have a representative whose duty is to diffuse information about Justice and Peace at the level of the Provinces. This is a major institutional development: each Regional Council, like the provincial councils, will have a Justice and Peace referent whose mission will be the dissemination of Justice & Peace information.
There is no communion without good communication. And indeed, during our meetings, I often say that I dream of a Lay Dominican life preserving its long and traditional culture of deliberation (it takes time, a lot of time), but with a Jesuit-like efficiency.
As Coordinator, I dare say, and I am absolutely not the only one to think this, it would not be improbable that the Lay Dominican body organize itinerant preaching missions, and why not among the poorest, in places of fractures.
The Lay Dominican body is a reservoir of living forces with inestimable human, social, and professional competencies: it is up to us to seize them in full synodality.
II. The Poor Are Not an Optional Add-on, but Constitutive of the Catholic Faith’s Dogmatics: A Look at the Dominican Theological Heritage
My final point, more reflective, seeks, as theologian, “to put the Church back at the center of the village,” as one says in French, or more precisely to assert that the struggle against all forms of poverty (both structural and existential) is not a peripheral value of the Catholic faith but part of its DNA. It flows from the messianic work of Christ in the economy of Salvation.
The first apostolic exhortation of Pope Leo XIV Dilexi te goes clearly in this direction. Our “narcissistic capital” can rejoice to see our mendicant Order cited by the Pope:
“66. Saint Dominic de Guzmán, a contemporary of Francis, founded the Order of Preachers, with a different charism but the same radicalism of life. He wanted to proclaim the Gospel with the authority that comes from a life of poverty, convinced that the Truth needs witnesses of integrity. The example of poverty in their lives accompanied the Word they preached. Free from the weight of earthly goods, the Dominican Friars were better able to dedicate themselves to their principal work of preaching. They went to the cities, especially the universities, in order to teach the truth about God. [54] In their dependence on others, they showed that faith is not imposed but offered. And by living among the poor, they learned the truth of the Gospel “from below,” as disciples of the humiliated Christ.
67. The mendicant orders were therefore a living response to exclusion and indifference. They did not expressly propose social reforms, but an individual and communal conversion to the logic of the Kingdom. For them, poverty was not a consequence of a scarcity of goods, but a free choice: to make themselves small in order to welcome the small. As Thomas of Celano said of Francis: “He showed that he loved the poor intensely… He often stripped himself naked to clothe the poor, whom he sought to resemble.” [55] Beggars became the symbol of a pilgrim, humble and fraternal Church, living among the poor not to proselytize but as an expression of their true identity. They teach us that the Church is a light when she strips herself of everything, and that holiness passes through a humble heart devoted to the least among us.”
To echo the Holy Father, I add that all too often we forget in our theological curricula that the social doctrine of the Church is not a peripheral interest to the faith, but constitutive of the faith: St Pier Giorgio Frassati is called “the man of the eight Beatitudes” (what a dogmatic program, isn’t it?) by John Paul II; Giorgio La Pira went on strike, as Mayor, and occupied the Pignone factory in Florence in 1953 with the workers. Our identity as “poor mendicants” is prophetic: it signifies that the poor ought to be lifted from their poverty by an inductive methodology in which we are among the poor (because we recognize ourselves as poor) and not by a deductive paternalistic methodology.
We are not Dominicans only during Mass or when a sacrament is being practiced: we are so ontologically; it is therefore ontologically that the sacraments of the Church resonate in us for the Mission. Our post-industrial society pushes us toward division: I am Catholic for 45 minutes at Sunday Mass, and the rest of the week the question of the poor does not alert my conscience. There should be a greater sacramental unity between the practice of the sacraments and care for the poor: such is my conviction.
In a very long passage commenting on Jesus’ visit to Zacchaeus’ house, Albert the Great comments on the verse “Today salvation has come to this house” (Lk 19:9) underlining the necessity of helping the poor in connection with the sacrament of the Eucharist: it is a jewel of our Dominican tradition.
Among all the rooms in Zacchaeus’ house that Jesus visits, there is one that draws His attention: the upper room also called the cenacle. This cenacle invites reflection and Albert sees three tables there:
“The cenacle is occupied by holy meditation, which prepares the entire table for the bed of the table to extend there. For frequent meditation is a return of the spirit upon what it has previously heard or discovered. It is thus, in fact, that Christ restored Himself. Mk 14:15: ‘He will show you a large furnished upper room; there you prepare.’ But alas! today these domestic sanctuaries are in ruins, because there is no longer anyone who meditates day and night in the Law of God, as the holy person ought to do, according to Psalm 1:2.
And this is what Judas Maccabee laments. In this cenacle are three tables: the table of Scripture; the table of the Eucharist; and the table of alms.
From the table of Scripture, it is said in Lk 22:29-30: ‘And I assign to you, as my Father assigned to me, a kingdom, that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom’, that is, in the Church.
From the table of the Eucharist, it is said in Ps 22 (23):5: ‘You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.’
And of the table of the poor, which is realized in almsgiving, it is said in Tb 2:2: ‘Go, and bring some of our tribe, fearing God, that they may feast with us.’ And in Job 31:17: ‘Did I not eat my own bread alone, and the orphan was not fed?’”
The Eucharist, in its most pure sacramental mystery, is thus composed of three tables: the table of the Word of God preached, the table of the consecration celebrated upon the holy species, and finally—last but not least—the table of the poor.
The poor, then, are not extrinsic to the mystery of the Eucharist but intimately linked to it. Christ is truly and sacramentally present in the Word of God, in the consecration of bread and wine, and in the care given to the poor. It is the same Christ who dwells in these three tables of the Eucharist: substantially in the consecrated elements, spiritually in the proclamation of the Word, and mystically in our care for the poor, ill or disabled. It is the real presence of Christ in them that we recognize on the altar, at the ambo and in the world; no more, no less.
Pope Leo XIV takes up these arguments again by articulating Saint John Chrysostom, whose text we know only too well because we read it in my Province of France during Holy Week, as well as Saint Augustine:
“41. Among the Eastern Fathers, perhaps the most ardent preacher on social justice was Saint John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople from the late 300s to the early 400s. In his homilies, he exhorted the faithful to recognize Christ in the needy: “Do you wish to honor the body of Christ? Do not allow it to be despised in its members, that is, in the poor, who have no clothes to cover themselves. Do not honor Christ’s body here in church with silk fabrics, while outside you neglect it when it suffers from cold and nakedness… [The body of Christ on the altar] does not need cloaks, but pure souls; while the one outside needs much care. Let us therefore learn to think of and honor Christ as he wishes. For the most pleasing honor we can give to the one we want to venerate is that of doing what he himself desires, not what we devise… So you too, give him the honor he has commanded, and let the poor benefit from your riches. God does not need golden vessels, but golden souls.” [30] Affirming with crystal clarity that, if the faithful do not encounter Christ in the poor who stand at the door, they will not be able to worship him even at the altar, he continues: “What advantage does Christ gain if the sacrificial table is laden with golden vessels, while he himself dies of hunger in the person of the poor? Feed the hungry first, and only afterward adorn the altar with what remains.” [31] He understood the Eucharist, therefore, as a sacramental expression of the charity and justice that both preceded and accompanied it. That same charity and justice should perpetuate the Eucharist through love and attention to the poor.”
And the Pope continues even more strongly using Augustine as example: “For Augustine, the poor are not just people to be helped, but the sacramental presence of the Lord.”
One does not measure how much this document of Pope Leo XIV justifies, by means of the Roman Magisterium, our actions: to affirm that caring for the poor is sacramental in nature goes beyond all our hopes and confirms Catholic dogma in its intrinsic union with the social doctrine of the Church. Taking care of the poor is not a Sunday Catholic hobby, but part of the very identity of the Catholic; this is a radical advance in the Magisterium.
Without wishing to go into excesses where, e.g., Bernard of Clairvaux and Peter Damian considered the mandatum of the washing of the feet a sacrament (our position is not to extend the set of the seven sacraments), we can affirm that there is a quality of sacramental presence of Christ in the poor.
Our brother Gustavo Gutiérrez also emphasized the fact that in the face of the absurdity of evil, we cannot be satisfied with ready-made, prefabricated answers, like Job’s three friends attempting to justify his suffering, mysterious as it is: our word must be inductive, inclusive, and contextual; and we must not forget that preaching begins with listening. The suffering of Job is as much social as existential: the two are intrinsically linked.
In writing the Book of Job, speaking of God from the suffering of the innocent — a book I recommend highly — one could say that our brother Gustavo made a “Good Job”! This inductive approach resonates with our vocation of “Mendicant-Preachers.”
We do not help the poor for the sake of our own good conscience: we help the poor because it is the mandatum — irretrievably dogmatic — of Christ and because we are eager to follow Christ, the one and unique center of our life; and in the poor, we recognize Christ, His presence; we listen to Him, we serve Him, and in the end we love Him. And perhaps also because we ourselves are poor…
There is something beautiful among the Lay Dominicans: they extend, by virtue of their baptismal sacrament, the celebration of the Eucharist by engaging with the poor, never by paternalism, always with care to render the only true worship pleasing to God. Christ’s presence comes to meet us in the poor.
There thus exists an essential patristic and medieval tradition with regard to the social doctrine of the Church, and our Order can be proud to have contributed to a better unity of life.
How many theological jewels could inspire us in our actions for Justice and Peace today and become a real strength of theological engineering? There are so many!
I hope that, within the framework of a traditional Catholic theology, these theological jewels would be cultivated and communicated anew for better action of support toward the most vulnerable: this could lead to a real axis of research. As Christ, the poor precede us on our respective paths toward Galilee (Mk 16:7).
Let us then continue running to meet Him!
M. Sébastien Milazzo, O.P.
International Coordinator ICLDF