Saint Saint Dominic, Priest

Saint Dominic, OP (Spanish: Santo Domingo; 8 August 1170 – 6 August 1221), also known as Dominic de Guzmán , was a Castilian Catholic priest and the founder of the Dominican Order. He is the patron saint of astronomers and natural scientists, and he and his order are traditionally credited with spreading and popularizing the rosary. Dominic was born in Caleruega, halfway between Osma and Aranda de Duero in Old Castile, Spain. He was named after Saint Dominic of Silos. The Benedictine abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos lies a few miles north of Caleruega. In the earliest narrative source, by Jordan of Saxony, Dominic's parents are not named. The story is told that before his birth his barren mother made a pilgrimage to the Abbey at Silos, and dreamt that a dog leapt from her womb carrying a flaming torch in its mouth, and seemed to set the earth on fire. This story is likely to have emerged when his order became known, after his name, as the Dominican order, Dominicanus in Latin, and a play on words interpreted as Domini canis: "Dog of the Lord." Jordan adds that Dominic was brought up by his parents and a maternal uncle who was an archbishop. The failure to name his parents is not unusual, since Jordan wrote a history of the Order's early years, rather than a biography of Dominic. A later source of the 13th century gives their names as Juana and Felix. Nearly a century after Dominic's birth, the local author Rodrigo de Cerrato asserted that Dominic's father was an honored and wealthy man in his village. The travel narrative of Pero Tafur, written circa 1439 (about a pilgrimage to Dominic's tomb in Italy), states that Dominic's father belonged to the family de Guzmán, and that his mother belonged to the Aça or Aza family. Dominic's mother, Joan of Aza, was beatified by Pope Leo XII in 1829. His older brother, Manés was also beatified by Pope Gregory XVI on 1834.