Michaelmass - Companions of the Community of the Resurrection ...

eceived more than any other brother in the Community. He liked to include
with his personal letters a photocopy of a religious picture or poem. In old age
he always had some subject he was studying and he would send friends his
thoughts about it. Favourite subjects were Angels, the Holy Spirit and St Francis
of Assisi. His contacts extended across the entire Battyeford community, not
only church people. After more than forty years Dominic knew the people and
they knew him.
In 2013 Dominic was visibly weaker and died in his sleep on 12 th June. May
the Good Shepherd receive this shepherd into his heavenly fold.
Crispin Harrison CR
Some Memories of Dominic
Dominic’s father was an academic in the medical
faculty of McGill University, Montreal, so he
remembered a childhood spent partly in that place,
the second largest Francophone city in the world.
He talked about humid summers, bitter winters,
and of toffee made by flinging maple syrup into
snow. He would ask me to bring syrup from Canada.
His father later taught at Oxford. A portion of the
human eye is named after him. At Oxford (and at
Cuddesdon) Dominic was a contemporary of and
friendly with Augustine Hoey; in Derby diocese
Dominic was a contemporary of and friendly with Donald Patey, another curate
who hoped to test a vocation at Mirfield. The bishop was reluctant to release
both men and there was a robust correspondence between him and the Superior,
Raymond Raynes.
Dominic would remind me several times a year that his baptismal name was
Robert, and that in 1098 St Robert of Molesme was one of the three founders
of the Cistercians who were later eclipsed by the more famous St Bernard of
Clairvaux. But when Dominic became a novice in 1945 his baptismal name had
already been pre-empted by the famous Robert Baker of Penhalonga.
One did not readily think of Dominic as a logic-chopping philosopher. If most
Dominicans are inspired by the notion of God as Absolute Truth, Dominic was
inspired by the notion of God as Absolute Beauty. And why not? Fra Angelico
belonged to the Order of Preachers as much as did Fra Thomas Aquinas. It is
as proper to be motivated by the frescoes in St Mark’s in Florence as it is to be
motivated by the major and minor premises of the Summa. Fr Bernard Walke of
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