Dominic Loricatus

Who was Dominic Loricatus?

Dominic Loricatus, O.S.B. Cam., was an Umbrian monk, born in the Italian village of Luceolis near Cantiano. His father, seeking social advancement, paid a bribe to have him ordained a priest when still a child. When he discovered the fact, he resolved on a life of penance and became a hermit in the woods near the abbey of S. Emiliano in Congiuntoli, then a Benedictine monk at the monastery of Fonte Avellana in 1040.

Fonte Avellana was at this time under the influence of St. Peter Damian, who promoted penitential self-mortification. It is through his vigorous embrace of this practice that Dominic Loricatus has become most well known, particularly through a mention by Edward Gibbon in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

"By a fantastic arithmetic, a year of penance was taxed at three thousand lashes; and such was the skill and patience of a famous hermit, Saint Dominic of the iron Cuirass, that in six days he could discharge an entire century, by a whipping of three hundred thousand stripes. His example was followed by many penitents of both sexes; and, as a vicarious sacrifice was accepted, a sturdy disciplinarian might expiate on his own back the sins of his benefactors."