Members of the order, who are referred to as Dominicans , generally display the letters OP after their names, standing for Ordinis Praedicatorum , meaning 'of the Order of Preachers'. Membership in the order includes friars , [ a ] nuns , active sisters , and lay or secular Dominicans formerly known as tertiaries.
More recently, there have been a growing number of associates of the religious sisters who are unrelated to the tertiaries. Founded to preach the gospel and to oppose heresy , the teaching activity of the order and its scholastic organisation placed it at the forefront of the intellectual life of the Middle Ages.
The Dominican Order came into being during the Middle Ages at a time when men of God were no longer expected to stay behind the walls of a cloister.
Instead, they travelled among the people, taking as their examples the apostles of the primitive Church. Like his contemporary, Francis, Dominic saw the need for a new type of organization, and the quick growth of the Dominicans and Franciscans during their first century of existence confirms that conditions were favorable for the growth of the orders of mendicant friars.
The Dominicans and other mendicant orders may have been an adaptation to the rise of the profit economy in medieval Europe. Dominic sought to establish a new kind of order, one that would bring the dedication and systematic education of the older monastic orders like the Benedictines to bear on the religious problems of the burgeoning population of cities, but with more organizational flexibility than either monastic orders or the secular clergy.
