Great saints sometimes arrive together

Today's feast of St Dominic set me thinking about those periods in history which seem to produce spectacular lives of sanctity, lives of founding figures who gave an impetus that has been felt by multitudes since their day. St Dominic and St Francis were contemporaries, achieving their greatest work in the early thirteenth century. They were preceded by St Bernard of Clairvaux - sometimes referred to as 'the last of the Fathers'. In the sixteenth century we have a plethora of such figures. Alongside our Teresa and John of the Cross we have St Ignatius, St Philip Neri, St Francis Xavier, persons of monumental influence in subsequent generations. The Church is like a garden, sometimes a riot of blossom, sometimes quiescent and subdued but always there, ready to bloom again. The same is true of course of Carmel, for the very word means 'garden'.