Blessed Reginald of Orleans

Who was Blessed Reginald of Orleans?

Blessed Reginald of Orleans was a French priest and canon lawyer who gave up a comfortable church career to follow St. Dominic in the first years of the Order of Preachers. He is remembered for one grace above all: when he lay dying in Rome in 1218, Our Lady healed him and showed him the habit the Dominicans still wear, with its long white scapular.

He lived only two more years. In that short time he filled the Dominican house at Bologna with novices, set Paris on fire with his preaching, and drew into the Order the man who would succeed Dominic, Blessed Jordan of Saxony. The Dominicans keep his feast on February 12.

A dean of Orleans who wanted to be poor

Reginald had taught canon law at the University of Paris "with applause," as an old Dominican life puts it, and had become dean of the chapter of canons at Orleans. Most accounts say he was born at Orleans about 1180; the 1901 Short Lives of the Dominican Saints says he came from Saint-Gilles in the south of France.

Early in 1218 he traveled to Rome with his bishop, meaning to pray at the tombs of the apostles and go on to Jerusalem. In Rome he met Dominic and opened his heart to him. He told the friar he longed to leave everything and preach Jesus Christ in voluntary poverty. Dominic gladly promised to receive him.

Healed by Our Lady

Then Reginald fell gravely ill. Dominic, as he later told the brethren, begged God not to take from him "a son as yet hardly born." The Short Lives tells what happened next:

And even whilst he yet prayed, the Blessed Virgin Mary, accompanied by the virgin martyrs, Saint Cecilia and Saint Catharine, appeared to Master Reginald, and, extending her virginal hand, anointed his eyes, ears, nostrils, mouth, hands, and feet, pronouncing certain words appropriate to each anointing. Then she showed him the habit of the Friars Preachers, saying to him, "Behold the habit of thy Order."

Reginald woke cured. He asked Dominic to keep the vision secret until his death, and Dominic did. But the Order changed its dress. The first friars had worn the linen surplice of canons regular; now they took the woolen scapular that Our Lady had held in her hands. The Dominican clothing ceremony still gives the scapular with the words "the maternal pledge from heaven of the love of the Blessed Virgin Mary towards us."

Bologna and Paris

After his recovery Reginald made his pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Toward the end of 1218, the Catholic Encyclopedia records, Dominic left for Spain and named Reginald his vicar in Italy. Reginald also took charge of the friars at Bologna, the great university town.

The results astonished everyone. Within six months, the Short Lives says, he received more than a hundred men into the Order, many of them learned and well known, so that people joked it was not safe to go and hear Master Reginald unless you wanted to wear the friars' habit. An early biographer wrote that his preaching, "like a burning torch, inflamed the hearts of all his hearers. Very few people were so stony-hearted that they could resist the effects of this fire."

Dominic then sent him to Paris. The brethren at Bologna wept as if torn from their mother's arms, for all his strict discipline. At Paris the same thing happened: students and masters came to hear him, and vocations followed. Among them was Jordan of Saxony, who took the habit at the convent of Saint-Jacques on Ash Wednesday, 1220.

Someone once asked him how a man used to so much comfort could bear the hard life of the friars. He looked down and answered: "Truly I do not think to merit anything for that before the tribunal of God. He has given me so much consolation in my soul, that the rigours of which you speak have become very sweet and easy to me."

His death

Reginald fell ill again early in 1220. Jordan of Saxony, the Short Lives records, saw his death coming in a vision: a clear, sparkling fountain sprang up in the church of Saint-Jacques and then suddenly ran dry. When the superior of the Paris house came to tell Reginald his illness was mortal and to offer him Extreme Unction, he answered:

I do not fear the assault of death, since the blessed hands of Mary anointed me in Rome. Nevertheless, because I would not make light of the Church's Sacrament, I will receive it, and humbly ask that it may be given to me.

He died in February 1220, having worn the habit barely two years. The friars had no cemetery of their own yet, and he was buried at Notre-Dame-des-Champs in Paris. The Order honored him from the beginning, and his cult was formally confirmed under Pope Pius IX.

The miracle of Blessed Reginald

• Traditional: his healing in Rome by Our Lady, with Sts. Cecilia and Catherine, and the showing of the Dominican habit. The story was handed on in the Order from Dominic's own telling and is carved on Dominic's tomb in Bologna, made within fifty years of the event.

No miracle was formally examined for him in the modern way; his beatification confirmed a cult already centuries old.

Symbols of Blessed Reginald in art

Reginald is almost always shown in one scene, and it is easy to recognize:

• A sick man in bed with the Virgin Mary bending over him, sometimes anointing him;
• Two crowned or richly dressed women saints, St. Cecilia and St. Catherine of Alexandria, standing with Our Lady;
• The white scapular or the whole habit held out to him, the key to the story;
• St. Dominic praying nearby or receiving him into the Order.

Fra Angelico's workshop, Zurbarán and Nicola Pisano's carvers all tell it this way, which is why the picture is called "the vision of the Dominican habit." The scene even appears on the Dominican scapular given at the master general's house in Rome, as the Catholic Encyclopedia notes.

Feast day and prayer

We keep the feast of Blessed Reginald on February 12. See the feast day calendar.

The Dominican collect for his feast, as printed in the Short Lives of the Dominican Saints, is a prayer we can make our own:

O Almighty and everlasting God, who didst gift Thy Blessed Confessor Reginald with the singular protection of Thy most holy Mother, grant us, by his merits and prayers, to be strengthened by the perpetual succour of the same ever-glorious Virgin. Who livest and reignest, world without end. Amen.

Let us ask Blessed Reginald to pray for preachers and students, for priests who wear the scapular of Mary, and for the sick who wait on God's mercy.