My topic given to me by the eminent Father Gregory Pine is evangelization and beauty.

So, ever since the 13th century, since the night that St. Dominic, the founder of the Order of Preachers,

stayed up one night, all night, with an Albigensian innkeeper in Toulouse, France,

in the morning the man was converted,

has the question of evangelization been a critical one for Dominicans,

and really for the whole world, but especially for Dominicans.

Even though it's a word that you're not going to find in the writings of St. Thomas, et cetera, it's kind of a modern word evangelization.

And what particularly fascinates Dominicans about that night in that inn is what did St. Dominic do?

How did he evangelize him?

How did he manage to pull this off so that by the morning,

this heretic didn't want to be a heretic anymore? And the one thing that we can rule out

is that St. Dominic did not read to the man from the Summa Theologica, and not simply because

it hadn't been written yet. Because when a heart is as lost as that man's heart was,

it cannot be won back by an argument.

There's only one thing that can renew and recharge and revive

and whatever word you want to use, a heart lost like that.

And it is beauty.

St. Basil the Great says,

human beings by nature desire the beautiful.

St. Thomas Aquinas says that the mind is more inclined by desire to act intensely

in things that are new. The mind is more inclined by desire to act intensely in things that are new.

Why? Because new things are beautiful. Think about

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