Saint Raymond of Peñafort

Raymond of Peñafort was a man who didn’t want people talking about him, and he managed it rather well: he even hid the documents about his own birth. We know he was born around 1175, in Catalonia, and we work it out by subtraction — the chronicles say he died close to a hundred, in 1275. He was first of all a man of learning. At twenty he taught logic and rhetoric in the cloisters of Barcelona Cathedral; then he went to Bologna, which back then was the place to study law, and he taught there, paid a salary by the city government. On Good Friday of 1222 he joined the Dominicans. As a jurist he wrote the Summa de Casibus Poenitentiae for confessors, a handbook on cases of conscience; as a trusted man of Pope Gregory IX he compiled all the Decretals, the work for which historians of law still remember him. But the thing worth telling is something else. In 1223 he helped Peter Nolasco found the Mercedarian Order, born for a precise reason: **to ransom slaves**. In a Mediterranean where people were kidnapped and sold, a group of religious set out to pay to buy them back. He was also confessor to King James I of Aragon and master general of the Dominicans. He was proclaimed a saint in 1601. If your name is Raymond, today is your name day. It’s an old name, the kind that comes back in families because of a grandfather, and that whoever carries it has usually learned to defend. Of a man who spent his life writing rules, what remains above all is that he used them to set people free.