Pope Innocent III dreams St. Dominic holds up the falling Lateran basilica

ROME, 1215 AD — Saint Dominic, a canon from Castile who had spent ten years preaching in the south of France, came to Rome in 1215 AD to ask Pope Innocent III to confirm a new order of preachers. He asked while the Pope’s Fourth Lateran Council was forbidding anyone to found a new religious order, and at first Pope Innocent III would not approve it. While the request hung undecided, Tradition holds, Pope Innocent III dreamed that the Lateran basilica was falling and that St. Dominic was holding it up.

St. Dominic wanted the Pope to confirm an order that would be called an order of preachers and would truly be one. He meant it to be a body of men who preached and taught, and who studied Scripture so that they could preach. But preaching had always been the bishops’ work. The council’s remedy for bishops who neglected it was to let each of them appoint men to preach for him, as his deputies, and it made no room for preachers of any other kind. So an order of preachers was something new, and it looked like a trespass on the bishops’ rights. The council’s thirteenth canon shut out new orders altogether: “we strictly prohibit that any one do for the future form any new Order; whoever desires to become a religious, let him do so in one of those already approved.”

St. Dominic was about forty-five. He was born at Caleruega in Old Castile and became subprior of the cathedral canons of Osma. In 1204 AD he and his bishop, Diego of Osma, had stood before this same Pope. Bishop Diego asked to go and preach to the pagan Cumans, but Pope Innocent III refused and sent the two men to Languedoc, where the Albigensian heresy had taken hold. Bishop Diego died in 1207 AD. St. Dominic stayed and kept preaching, with a few companions who had taken no vows to him. Humbert of Romans, who later governed the Order, wrote that St. Dominic “bore with a great heart a multitude of affronts, ignominies, and sufferings for the name of Jesus Christ.”

Earlier in 1215 AD, Bishop Fulk of Toulouse issued a charter naming St. Dominic and his companions preachers of his diocese, men who, “as barefooted religious, purpose preaching the gospel and pursuing the path of evangelic poverty.” Bishop Fulk gave them a sixth of the diocese’s tithes to live on. When Bishop Fulk set out for Rome in September, St. Dominic went with him. The whole community St. Dominic left behind was six men, none of them learned, in a house at Toulouse.

In Rome, Bishop Fulk and St. Dominic put the plan to the Pope, and Bishop Fulk told him how badly the war-torn provinces of France needed preachers. Pope Innocent III showed no wish to approve it. The two men asked him a second time, and he turned them down again. St. Dominic spent his days visiting the relics of the saints in the city’s churches and his nights in prayer.

Pope Benedict XV, writing seven centuries later for the anniversary of St. Dominic’s death, recalled what came next: “It is recorded that, prostrate at the feet of Innocent III, he vowed himself to the defense of the Roman Pontificate, and that the same predecessor of ours the following night saw him in vision sustain on his courageous shoulder the tottering pile of the Lateran Basilica.”

That night, Pope Innocent III was asleep in the palace beside the Lateran basilica, the mother church of Rome and the building where his council was sitting. In his dream the basilica began to come apart at its joints, and he saw that it was about to collapse. He watched it, trembling and grieving. Then St. Dominic ran up from the other side, put his shoulders under the falling walls and held the whole building up. Humbert wrote that God had let the Pope hesitate at first so that the dream would show him how badly the whole Church he governed needed what St. Dominic was asking for.

Pope Innocent III sent for St. Dominic and told him to go back to his brothers, agree with every one of them on a rule the Church had already approved, and return for the Pope’s confirmation.

The council closed in December, and St. Dominic went back to Languedoc. In 1216 AD he found that the six men at Toulouse had become fifteen or sixteen, and he called them to Prouille to choose a rule the Church had already approved. They took the Rule of St. Augustine, with stricter customs of their own on food, fasting, beds and woollen clothes.

Pope Innocent III died at Perugia in July 1216 AD, before St. Dominic could bring the rule back to him. His successor, Pope Honorius III, confirmed the order on December 22, 1216 AD, in two bulls addressed to St. Dominic. Pope Honorius III wrote in one of them: “We, considering that the brethren of your Order will be the champions of the faith and true light of the world, do confirm the Order.”