The Pope said no twice, then dreamed a church was falling

ROME, 1215 AD — Saint Dominic came from Castile and had spent ten years preaching in the south of France. By 1215 AD his whole group was six men living in one house at Toulouse. None of them had much schooling.

Early that year Bishop Fulk of Toulouse named St. Dominic and his companions preachers for his area. Bishop Fulk wrote that they went barefoot, and that they meant to preach the gospel and live as poor men. He gave them a sixth of the church money from his area to live on.

In September Bishop Fulk set out for Rome, and St. Dominic went with him. St. Dominic wanted Pope Innocent III to approve his men as a new order of preachers.

When they arrived, the Pope’s great meeting of bishops, the Fourth Lateran Council, was forbidding anyone to start a new religious order.

St. Dominic wanted a group of men who preached and taught, and who studied Scripture so that they could preach. But preaching had always been the bishops’ job. The council said a bishop who wasn’t preaching could pick men to preach in his place. It allowed no other preachers. So an order of preachers was something new, and it looked as if it was taking over the bishops’ job.

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

A church coming apart at the joints

Then, Tradition holds, Pope Innocent III had a dream. He was asleep in the palace beside the Lateran basilica. It was the mother church of Rome, and his council was meeting inside it.

In his dream the basilica began to split apart where its walls were joined. He could see it was about to fall down. He watched it, shaking and full of sorrow. Then St. Dominic came running from the other side. He put his shoulders under the falling walls and held the whole building up.

Pope Innocent III sent for St. Dominic. The Pope told him to go back to his brothers and agree with all of them on a rule the Church had already approved. Then St. Dominic was to come back for the Pope’s approval. That way the new group would live under an old rule, and the council’s ban on new orders would stand.

Humbert of Romans later led St. Dominic’s order. He wrote that God had let the Pope hold back at first. The dream, Humbert wrote, would show the Pope how badly the whole Church needed what St. Dominic was asking for.

The council ended in December, and St. Dominic went back to the south of France. In 1216 AD he found that the six men at Toulouse had become fifteen or sixteen. He called them together at Prouille. They chose the Rule of St. Augustine. They added stricter customs of their own about 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. The next Pope was Pope Honorius III. He approved the order on December 22, 1216 AD, in two official letters to St. Dominic. In one of them Pope Honorius III wrote: “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.”