Saint Dominic of Silos

Saint Dominic of Silos was a Benedictine abbot who in the eleventh century raised the monastery of Silos in Castile from its decline and restored there monastic discipline and the praise of God by day and by night. Before that he had been a priest and a hermit. The Church commemorates him on December 20.

He was born around the year 1000 in Cañas, in today’s region of La Rioja, which then belonged to the kingdom of Navarre. The exact year of his birth is not known. As a boy he tended his family’s sheep for several years; then he began his studies and was ordained a priest. The oldest source of what we know about him is the life written by Grimaldus, a monk of Silos who had been his disciple.

For a year and a half he was a priest in his native village, and then he withdrew for another year and a half to live as a hermit. Around 1030 he entered the Benedictine abbey of San Millán de la Cogolla. There he was entrusted with restoring the run-down priory of Saint Mary in Cañas, and in time he became prior of San Millán. It was then that the king of Navarre, García of Nájera, demanded the monastery’s goods. Dominic refused, lost his office, and had to leave the kingdom.

He took refuge in Castile with King Ferdinand I. In 1041 the king entrusted to him the monastery of Saint Sebastian at Silos, run down and almost in ruins. Dominic became its abbot and led it for nearly thirty-three years. He rebuilt the church and the monastic buildings, and the tradition of the abbey links the beginnings of the Romanesque cloister with his rule. He brought the community back to fidelity to the rule and to common prayer. Books were copied in the monastery’s scriptorium.

Already in his lifetime he had a reputation for holiness. He worked to free Christians who had been carried off into captivity by the Moors, and after his death many captives attributed their regained freedom to his intercession. That is why he is depicted with chains and venerated as a patron of captives.

He died at Silos on December 20, 1073, and was buried in the monastery cloister. Pilgrims soon began to come to his tomb. In 1076 the bishop had his body solemnly transferred to the abbey church, which in those days meant that the deceased was recognized as a saint. This happened when no formal process of canonization yet existed; Dominic has been venerated as a saint since the eleventh century, and his name is in the Roman Martyrology. In time the monastery took his name.

According to tradition, nearly a hundred years later Blessed Joan of Aza, from nearby Caleruega, prayed at his tomb and in his honor gave the name Dominic to her son, the future founder of the Order of Preachers. Women expecting a child also turned to the abbot of Silos, and for centuries his crozier was brought to the queens of Spain for the time of childbirth. In the Abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos, where his relics rest, Benedictine monks live to this day.