Chocolate is a little-known part of the Dominican Order’s heritage. In drink form, chocolate was enjoyed by some of the most driven personalities of the Order’s history, who served God with fiery intensity while being strengthened by grace and cocoa.

Bartolomé de las Casas, the relentless crusader for indigenous rights, praised chocolate as a “tasty and agreeable” drink, and he is often credited as the first person to bring chocolate to Europe. In 1544, shortly after successfully pressuring Charles I to pass New Laws protecting natives from slavery, Las Casas brought a delegation of Kekchi Mayans with gifts of chocolate to the future king Philip II before returning to his mission field in Guatemala.

In 17th-century Peru, amid her strict fasts and severe mortifications, Saint Rose of Lima drank hot chocolate at least once. An early biography of St. Rose notes that on one occasion, when she became alarmingly weak and faint, she returned to her parents’ house from her garden hermitage. Although she seemed close to death, St. Rose assured her anxious mother not to worry, and a servant soon came to the house bringing a silver cup full of cocoa. Smiling, St. Rose told her mother that she had sent her guardian angel to speak to a prominent woman in Lima, informing the woman about St. Rose’s weakness and her need for some chocolate to restore her strength.

Across the Pacific, in Fujian, Saint Peter Sanz requested shipments of chocolate from Manila as a remedy for the illnesses ailing his band of missionaries. When St. Peter and four other friars were arrested in 1746, Chinese officials were especially puzzled by two of their possessions, which they thought were used to enchant and corrupt the people. These were the bones of the martyr Saint Francis de Capillas and a brick of chocolate—spiritual and bodily helps for the weary missionaries. The five chocolate-drinkers prayed to St. Rose for strength amid their imprisonment, and they rejoiced as, over the next two years, they were beaten, flogged, had their ankles crushed, and were joined to Capillas in the glory of martyrdom.

These Dominican heroes prompt us to consider that intense zeal for goods of God’s kingdom—social justice, self-denial, mission, martyrdom—can coincide with valuing and sharing ordinary goods like chocolate, especially when frailty calls for them. 

On the other hand, the next time we drink a hot chocolate, we can consider that, like these Dominicans, we are made to hunger and thirst for more than the sweet comforts of this world. Our Lord thirsts for our hearts, and he wants them to burn ardently for his kingdom. He does not want to spit us out lukewarm.

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Image: Francisco Zurbarán, Still Life with a Bowl of Chocolate (c. 1640)