Our Lady of Mercy

Our Lady of Mercy takes her Italian name, Madonna della Mercede, from a Spanish word, *merced*, which comes from the Latin *merces*: price, reward. But the sense in which it’s used is that of grace given freely. So Our Lady of Mercy is the Lady of mercy — and at the same time, very concretely, the Lady of ransom. The story says that on August 1, 1218, Peter Nolasco had a vision of the Virgin, who asked him to found an order devoted to ransoming Christians who had ended up enslaved by Muslims. In those years, in the western Mediterranean, it was a mass phenomenon: thousands of people captured along the coasts and sold in the markets of North Africa. That’s how the Mercedarians were born, with the fourth vow that sets them apart from every other order: to offer themselves as hostages in place of a prisoner, when there was no other way to free him. The title then spread enormously through the Spanish-speaking world. La Mercè is the patron saint of Barcelona, and her feast in September is the biggest in the city. In Latin America the name Mercedes is among the most common there are — and from there, by a roundabout route, it even ended up on the hood of a German car: the daughter of an Austrian dealer had that name. The Smorfia puts the Madonna at number eight. If your name is Mercede or Mercedes, today is your name day.