Feast Day: May 12th
If someday you get the chance to walk the Camino de Santiago and take the most popular “French route” to Compostela when you are about halfway across that northern section of Spain you’ll stop in the picturesque town of Santo Domingo de la Calzada and visit the cathedral in the center of town to get the all-important stamp on your pilgrim passport. But as you try to pray in the cool and dark church, like millions of pilgrims before you, you might get distracted by two hens scratching around the choir loft.
But to explain the hens we must first explain the name of the town. “Santo Domingo de la Calzada” literally means “Saint Dominic of the Causeway”, recalling the bridges and other infrastructure that St. Dominic built for the pilgrims traversing that part of the Camino. Now, the St. Dominic we’re talking about lived about hundred years before the more famous St. Dominic Guzman (of the rosary), though neither of them were the first St. Dominic, because St. Dominic of Silos, a Spanish abbot, lived some decades before either of them. (And all three of them lived several hundred years after the latest St. Dominic, Savio). Ok, enough St. Dominic’s for now, to explain how this specific Domingo got to that forested stretch of the Camino, and how he found his vocation there, we need to talk bugs.
Probably within a week of this article appearing before you, there will be billions of cicadas emerging around central Illinois. We (happily?) live in one of the few places on the planet where the geographical regions of the two groups of periodical cicadas overlap, AND you and I get to experience both broods, for the first time in over two hundred years, emerge the same summer. The eminent website. CicadaMania.com, has a highlighted line on their information page about these two major groups: “Special note: Brood XIX (19) will also emerge in 2024 [along with Brood XIII]. While the two broods do not overlap, they come closest in the Springfield, Illinois area.” Hurrah! Now, what has this to do with St. Dominic of the Causeway? Well, the reason he began his life’s work of caring for pilgrims on the camino was because of a similar swarm of bugs.
The people of Spain in the 1000s were starving because of a disasterous swarm of locusts. Now, locusts and cicadas are not the same insect, actually a swarm of locusts is far worse than a brood (or two) of cicadas because locusts eat crops (cicadas eat tree sap) and locusts swarm (in large enough numbers they eat every plant in the area and then move to another location to similarly decimate the vegetation there. Cicadas just die off.) Young Domingo, a hundred kilometers from these terrible bugs, was trying to be a hermit. He had turned away by from the Benedictines, but still felt a call to a life consecrated to God, so had not returned to his family’s work as shepherds).
Bishop Gregory IV of Ostia (a Benedictine as Providence would have it) was sent by Pope Leo IX to help the afflicted people there in Spain, and the bishop asked Domingo to join his charitable efforts amid the disaster. His invitation opened Dominic’s heart to the plight of the people around him, and with the bishop he learned how to build roads and bridges, to rebuild farms and infrastructure, and construct shelter for the distraught population. The bishop also ordained Dominic a priest, and send him back towards his hometown, not far from his old hermitage, having discovered how God wanted him to reflect His love into the world: caring for the pilgrims walking the Camino there.
And 300 years later a German family walked across that bridge that St. Dominic had built and stayed at one of the hostels in town. Their teenage son (wisely) rejected the advances of a teenage girl at the hostel they were staying at. She, distraught, angry, vengeful, hid a silver cup in the boy’s bag and then accused him of stealing it. According to the justice of the time, the seeming scoundrel was sentenced to be hung, a ghastly turn of events while on pilgrimage with his family to Compostela. His parents, praying to St. Domingo, buried there in the cathedral, tearfully approached their son’s body dead on the gallows … only to discover him alive again. They ran to the magistrate stammering about a miracle. He, in the middle of eating his chicken dinner, scoffed “Your son is as alive as this rooster and chicken that I was feasting on before you interrupted me.” And the rooster leapt up from his plate and began to sing! And so there are now chickens in the choir loft of Santo Domingo’s cathedral.
– Fr. Dominic takes one more lesson from St. Dominic’s life. Just as he had discovered his vocation because of the invitation of Bp. Gregory, he did the same for another young man, Juan de Ortega, who also was trying his hand at being a hermit, and who Dominic invited to risk a life of charity built on that foundation of contemplation. And so they worked together to care for the little Christ’s on their pilgrimage there, eventually creating the town we now know as Santo Domingo de la Calzada. Who can you invite to the adventure of Christian Love this week?