All Saints Day is proof positive that the Christian life works. God has in fact saved real, concrete people, and untold numbers at that. Which means the halls of heaven are teeming, not only with spiritual stars—the martyrs and mystics, popes and doctors—but also everyday, ordinary Catholics: mothers and fathers, siblings and neighbors, church ladies and ushers, cradle Catholics and death-bed converts galore.

If such is the case for All Saints Day in the universal Church, so also for today, the Feast of All Dominican Saints, in the Dominican Order. That the Church has dared approve such a feast for the Order of Preachers (and for five other orders in this month of November) speaks for itself: the Dominican life works!

There are, it turns out, dogs in heaven: God’s dogs, his Domini-canes, his hounds of the Lord. And not only the big dogs, like Aquinas, Albert, and Ferrer, or Catherine, Rose, and De Porres, or the other 276 official celestial canines, but also ordinary Dominican priests and brothers, priors and procurators, professors and preachers, confessors and chaplains, missionaries and itinerants, nuns, sisters and lay tertiaries—anyone in any age who faithfully lived until death the obedience he professed in Dominican life.

To understand this abundant and diverse Dominican sanctity, we are best to behold Dominic himself, who is addressed as the Pie and Magne Pater (loving and great father) of the whole Dominican family. Christ is the head and principle of the Church, the one from whom and through whom any and every grace given to any and every person passes, and, in Christ, Dominic stands in heaven as head and principle of the Dominican Order. All sons and daughters of Dominic are indebted to his intercession for the graces we receive from Christ himself.

What is so moving about this dynamic is that the sanctity of every Dominican saint is in some way reliant upon the sanctity of Dominic himself. Aquinas’s wisdom, Peter’s martyrdom, Ferrer’s preaching, Pius’s prudence, Catherine’s stigmata, Rose’s penance—each of these reflects the gigantic gift of grace that Dominic was given but did not himself exhaustively exercise in his earthly life. Instead, the Lord bid him wait, so that from heaven—more helpful to us now than he ever was on earth—Dominic’s intercession would be felt in the holy thoughts, words, and deeds of every Dominican soul, and likewise in the jolts of grace received by every person of God from any Dominican ministry.

In each and all the Dominican saints, whether famous or anonymous, we catch a glimpse of Dominic’s own special grace—the grace of the Word, which impelled him to speak always either with God or about God. Every Dominican’s life is indeed marked by his own cooperation with this Dominican grace, whereby he becomes a praedicator gratiae, a preacher of grace. Like Dominic, the Dominican first speaks with God in prayer and contemplative study, praising him and blessing him, and then he speaks forth about God in common life and the apostolate, predicating in word and deed the one truth who saves: Jesus Christ is Lord. All the Dominican saints we celebrate today have partaken of this grace, each in a unique measure. And so we chant at Vespers this evening: This is true fraternity, which conquers the darkness of the world by the love of Christ (Responsory, Feast of All Dominican Saints).

For all who are clothed in the Dominican life, and for all who benefit from the Order’s ministries in any way, the Feast of All Dominican Saints is a sign of wonderful hope. Dominic’s intercession, now compounded by that of untold Dominican saints throughout the ages, yet redounds to the salvation of a great multitude, which no one could count (Rev 7:9): thousands upon thousands of Dominicans hitherto, and millions upon millions of those touched by the Order’s charism. Today, we rejoice, praising and blessing God and beseeching Holy Father Dominic and the whole host of heavenly hounds, that they keep sending help for the holy preaching unto the ends of the earth: Fulfill Father, what you have said, and help us by your prayers.

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Image: J. Rolbels, The Genealogical Tree of St. Dominic