St. Dominic

Dominic de Guzmán died on August 6, 1221, in a cell of the priory he had founded three years earlier at Bologna, the university city where Pope Honorius III had sent him in 1218 to recruit among the canon lawyers. The Church keeps his memorial on August 8 — it was fixed on August 4 for centuries and moved in the calendar reform of 1969.

Born at Caleruega in Castile around 1170, Dominic was a canon of the cathedral chapter of Osma when he travelled through Languedoc and met the Albigensian preaching for the first time. He concluded that the answer had to match the method: preachers who argued in public and lived in the poverty their opponents claimed. Honorius III confirmed the Order of Preachers in 1216. Dominic dispersed his first friars to the universities rather than keeping them together, sending them to Paris and to Bologna, which is how he came to die in the second of them.

His tomb is in the Basilica of San Domenico at Bologna. The Arca di San Domenico that holds his remains was carved over three centuries by Nicola Pisano and his workshop, by Niccolò dell'Arca, and by the young Michelangelo, who cut the angel bearing a candlestick and the figures of Petronius and Proculus in 1494. Gregory IX canonized Dominic in 1234, thirteen years after his death.