Over eight hundred years ago, St. Dominic founded the Order of Preachers to be a vibrant men’s religious community “for preaching and the salvation of souls.” But from the very beginning, and indeed before officially establishing the friars, he also organized monasteries of nuns to aid the “holy preaching” through prayer and contemplative witness. In time active religious sisters also took on the Dominican charism as did members of the laity who joined the “Third Order” or Lay Fraternity of St. Dominic as it’s now known.

Life for Dominican friars is oriented to preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ. They live out the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience, following the Rule of St. Augustine and the Constitutions of the Order of Preachers. The Dominican way of life is marked by prayer, including the common celebration of the public prayer of the Church, study as the basis for preaching, fraternal life in community, and the work of preaching in its various forms. There is a contemplative character to Dominican life, but Dominicans are “active contemplatives,” sharing the fruit of their prayer, study, and common life with those they encounter. As the great Dominican theologian St. Thomas Aquinas expressed it, Dominicans seek “to contemplate and to give to others the fruits of contemplation.” In the more than eight centuries since its origin, the Order has numbered among its members theologians, mystics, Doctors of the Church, workers among the poor, popes, saints and innumerable men and women who have left less tangible traces of their work.