Choose one serious text and stay with it for months rather than sampling many: Scripture with a sound commentary, the Catechism, a treatise of St Thomas Aquinas taken in small daily portions, a Father of the Church. Begin every session with prayer to the Holy Spirit and end it with thanksgiving; if study does not begin and end in prayer it becomes mere acquisition. Read with a pen: for each article or paragraph, write down the question it answers and the answer in one sentence of your own. Follow the classical order — state the difficulty honestly and at its strongest before you answer it. Test everything you conclude against the Church's teaching rather than against your own judgement, and take genuine difficulties to a priest or a competent teacher instead of settling them alone. Return regularly to Scripture, which the Second Vatican Council calls the soul of theology. Then give the fruit away: teach a catechism class, answer the question a colleague asks, prepare the Sunday readings for your household. Study that is never handed on has stopped being Dominican.

The Order of Preachers, founded by St Dominic in 1216, made study a constitutive part of its life rather than a preparation for it; St Thomas Aquinas gave the tradition its motto in holding that it is greater to hand on to others what has been contemplated than merely to contemplate.

Spiritual reading

Dominican

About 30 minutes

Daily

spiritual_reading