With Him draws on the wisdom and experience of a man seized by Christ's call to the Order of Preachers, the Dominicans. That this is a self-effacing reflection on hope should not surprise us. Bruno Cadoré, former Master of the Order (2010–2019), reflects Saint Dominic's desire that Dominicans live out a commitment to a fraternity wherein self-effacement makes the necessary room to respond to the call to preach the one and original mission of Jesus, and to do so with others, within the church.

The book originates from a series of interviews of Cadoré by journalist-friend Fréderic Mounier and subsequently ordered by Cadoré into a collection of five chapters, containing a variety of themes. His life as a friar preacher begins to emerge in response to the question “Who am I?” The opening chapters, “Becoming a Dominican” and “Being a Preacher,” are uplifting, tender, and revealing: a journey unexpected and totally gratuitous, opening out into the freedom of a wider Dominican project beyond personal imagining.

The gift of this book lies in the skillful manner in which Cadoré expresses reason and faith in words that can be heard today. It is a penetrating and sometimes searing exploration of “the underside” of the world, his fundamental image for an authentic evangelization. Sent to Haiti for two years as a newly minted young Dominican, he was confronted by the poverty and exploitation of the local Indigenous people whom he served as a doctor. That experience has left a lasting impact, teaching him the necessity and power of listening to the underside “with Him,” the living Christ, God come into the world. His thoroughgoing analysis of humanity's plight, that of the earth, and of the church, is enriched by his extensive travels as Master. We hear his cri de coeur as a fellow pilgrim, crisscrossing the globe, “Encountering the World” (chapter 4). He stands alongside his Dominican sisters and brothers, encouraging, learning, and praying together with their people.

Prior to being elected Master, with a PhD in moral theology, Cadoré headed a research center in ethics at Lille Catholic University. Those unfamiliar with contemporary biomedical ethics can glean something of the fundamental processes of respecting and dialoguing with an interdisciplinary team of researchers. Making intensive efforts to listen to his colleagues, he grasps the need to cherish “otherness.” The heart of upholding Dominican spirituality is accepting that “all have a right to be what they are, to think what they think, to bring shades of meaning of their own, to witness to their way of hoping in humanity, to love the world, and in this every personality has its due” (71).

“Living the Order” (chapter 3) speaks to the Dominican charism as a radical, contemplative, and apostolic spirituality of friendship and communion, seeking out, conversing with and accompanying people where and as they are, and going out to those who do not know the church, or misjudge it or reject it (65). The order's maintaining unity expresses concern for the whole church and the manifold political and socioeconomic concerns besetting the world. The order has no hierarchy, yet he is forthright: “Clergy are no more the center than they are of evangelization” (75). The priority is to let those shut out from the conversation “act with us and for us” (125) and to form evangelizing communities in which laypeople take up their rightful place as the baptized. During the Vietnamese communist era, one hundred thousand lay Dominicans took over when all the religious were “hunted down” (81); a fraternity of lay Dominicans in New Norfolk Prison preached to fellow prisoners. Cadoré confesses, “We have not always lived, spoken, and acted in keeping with the Word that we wished to preach” (68), acknowledged in the order's recent, meticulous study of its role in the Inquisition. He argues that only self-conversion through humility will enable the preacher to speak a word of God. Such historical awareness is held in tension with contrasting experiences. During the same historical period, in the New World, other friar theologians and philosophers from Salamanca concerned with human rights developed a “Law of the Peoples” condemning the illegitimacy of the Spanish conquest.

Like Pope Francis’ teachings, Brother Bruno's invitation is urgent and possible: listen with Him to the underside as you encounter the world. This book is a must-read for undergraduate and postgraduate students, parishioners, and those who wish to pray with it. My only quibble concerns some awkward translations of words that do not always convey meanings accurately (e.g., “complicity”/“complementarity,” 77, 84; “conjugation”/“conjunction,” 129).