A Life, for his feast on the thirty-first day of August — III classis
Os iusti meditabitur sapientiam, et lingua eius loquetur iudicium: lex Dei eius in corde ipsius. “The mouth of the just shall meditate wisdom, and his tongue shall speak judgment: the law of his God is in his heart.” — Introit of the Mass, from Psalm 36
The Church could not have chosen the Introit more pointedly if she had written it for him. The saint whose feast this is passed into Christian memory with his lips sealed by an iron lock, set there by his captors precisely to silence the mouth of the just; and the Psalm answers across the centuries that the tongue so bound spoke judgment all the same, because the law of his God was in his heart, where no padlock reaches.
I. Non natus
He is the only saint in the calendar whose surname is a denial of his own birth. Nonnatus — non natus, “not born” — records the manner of his coming into the world: at Portell, a village of the Segarra in Catalonia, about the year of Our Lord 1204, his mother died in her labour, and the child was brought living from her body by the knife. He was, in the strict sense his contemporaries intended, never born; he was delivered as Caesar was said to have been, and the name clung to him for life and then forever.
The circumstance was not, in that age, a medical curiosity but a theological one. The child began his life at the price of his mother’s, drawn out of a death; and the whole of his subsequent history — a life spent purchasing other men out of captivity at the price of his own liberty — reads as if he had understood his nativity as a prophecy and resolved to fulfil it. He entered the world ransomed, and he left it a ransomer.
From this birth comes the patronage the faithful have never let him put down: he is the protector of women in childbirth, of expectant mothers, of midwives, and of the newly born — the saint of the most dangerous hour of ordinary human life, invoked wherever a mother labours in fear.
II. What the historian must say first
Honesty, which is the first debt a hagiographer owes both to his subject and to his reader, requires a plain statement at the outset: the documentary record of St. Raymond Nonnatus is thin, and late.
No contemporary life of him survives. The accounts from which every modern telling descends were composed within his Order centuries after his death, when the Mercedarians, seeking the confirmation of his immemorial cult, gathered the traditions of Catalonia and of their own houses into a connected narrative. The Bollandists, examining the dossier with their customary rigor, found the outline credible — a Catalan Mercedarian of the Order’s first generation, a redeemer of captives in Barbary, dead at Cardona in 1240, venerated at Portell from ancient times — and the ornaments unverifiable. The reader should therefore understand the sections that follow as the Church’s memory of the man rather than as a documented biography, and should notice where this account itself marks the passage from attested tradition into traditio pia — those elements retained because generations of the faithful have prayed by them, asserted here as devotional inheritance and not as established fact.
This is not a concession that diminishes him. The cult is itself a historical fact of great antiquity and tenacity; the Church examined it and confirmed it; and the traditions, whatever their documentary standing, preserve with perfect fidelity the shape of the Mercedarian vocation as the thirteenth century actually lived it. Where the individual portrait is soft, the institutional reality behind it is hard as iron: men did sail to Algiers with sacks of ransom money; the money did run out; and men did, under vow, hand themselves over to the chain in exchange for captives in danger of losing their faith. If tradition has Raymond do what his Order demonstrably did, tradition is at the very least painting a true picture on a wall we can no longer fully inspect.
III. The shepherd of Portell
The traditions make his family honourable — connected, some say, with the house of the viscounts of Cardona — and make his father a practical man who, observing the boy’s piety with the alarm such fathers feel, took him from his studies and set him to keep the family’s flocks, reasoning that sheep would cure him of sanctity. The remedy failed in the usual way. The solitude of the hills gave the young man precisely what the schoolroom could not: silence, and a chapel. Near his pastures stood an ancient shrine of Our Lady, and there the shepherd made his real apprenticeship, serving the Mother of God with that direct, unliterary Catalan devotion which asks nothing and offers everything.
It was to Our Lady, the traditions insist, that he owed his vocation; and the claim is fitting, for the Order he entered was hers by title and by origin.
IV. The Order of Ransom
In August of 1218, at Barcelona — so the constant tradition of the Order holds — the Blessed Virgin appeared in the same night to St. Peter Nolasco, to St. Raymond of Peñafort, and to King James I of Aragon, asking the foundation of an order for the redemption of captives; and on the tenth of that month the Order of Our Lady of Mercy for the Ransom of Captives, the Mercedarians, was instituted in the cathedral of Barcelona.
The need it answered was not devotional but desperate. The Mediterranean of the thirteenth century was a sea of raids; the Moorish powers of Spain and North Africa held Christian captives by the thousand, in the bagnios of Algiers and Tunis and Granada, where the price of relief was often apostasy. Against this the new Order set a weapon of terrible simplicity. To the three vows of religion its members added a fourth: that, if the redemption of a captive in danger of losing his faith required it, the religious would remain behind as a pledge in the captive’s place — would put his own body into the chain he had come to open. No romance has improved on the sober text of that vow. It is the counsel of the Good Shepherd made a constitution: the good shepherd giveth his life for his sheep.
Raymond, a young man of Portell already formed in Our Lady’s service, received the habit of her Order at Barcelona — from the hands, tradition says, of St. Peter Nolasco himself — among the first generation of that foundation. He made the fourth vow with the rest. He alone of his generation would become its proverb.
V. The ransomer ransomed
He was sent, after his profession, upon the Order’s work: first, it is said, within Spain, ransoming captives at Valencia and among the Moors of the peninsula; then, entrusted with a great sum, to Algiers itself, the capital of the trade in Christian flesh.
There the pattern of his nativity completed itself. The money was spent, the ransomed were shipped home, and captives remained — among them men wavering, whose faith would not survive their chains much longer. Raymond executed his vow. He gave himself as hostage in their place, and the freed men sailed for Spain against the surety of his body.
What follows belongs to the traditio pia, and is here labeled as such; but it should be told, because the Church’s iconography has canonized it and because it is, at the least, a true portrait of what such a hostage faced. The traditions relate that Raymond in his captivity would not be silent; that he consoled the Christian slaves, and preached Christ to his captors; that conversions followed; and that his masters, forbidden to kill him (a dead hostage being worthless), resolved instead to kill the preaching. His lips were bored through with a hot iron, and a padlock was set through the wound, its key kept by the governor, who opened the lock only at mealtimes. Thus the os iusti, the mouth of the just man, was closed with iron for the crime of speaking judgment.
Art has fixed him so: the Mercedarian habit, the palm, and the padlocked lips. And popular devotion, with its unerring instinct, drew the double lesson — invoking him ever since both for those unjustly silenced and slandered, and against the tongue’s sins, the gossip and calumny that no iron restrains. The saint whose mouth was locked for speaking Christ stands in permanent judgment over mouths that are all too free.
His Order did not leave him in pledge. A ransom was gathered and sent, and after a captivity the traditions measure in months of suffering, Raymond was bought back — the ransomer ransomed, as he had been at his birth — and recalled to Spain about the year 1239.
VI. The red hat he never wore in state
The traditions relate that his fame preceded him; that Gregory IX, hearing of the hostage of Algiers, created him Cardinal Deacon of Sant’Eustachio in 1239; and that the new cardinal received the dignity as saints do, changing neither his habit, nor his cell, nor his table, and setting out for Rome not in a cardinal’s train but as a poor religious on the road.
It must be said plainly that the cardinalate stands among the least documented elements of the dossier: the papal records of the period are imperfect, and scholars have long noted that Raymond’s promotion rests on the Order’s tradition rather than on surviving curial acts. The Church has not needed the point settled; his sanctity is not suspended from a hat. But the tradition, true or embellished, was preserved because of what it says: that the man who had worn the slave’s chain in Algiers could not be made grander by scarlet, and did not try.
VII. Cardona
He never reached Rome. On the road, at Cardona — within sight, as it were, of the country of his birth — he was seized by a violent fever, and it became clear that the summons he was answering had been amended by a higher court.
The traditions here give us one of the most tender legends in the calendar, and it is offered as legend, labeled and beloved: that as he lay dying without a priest at hand, Raymond, who had spent his liberty to keep captive men in reach of the sacraments, was not himself left unprovided — but received the Viaticum from the hands of Christ the Lord, who came to His servant attended by His saints, so that the last Communion of the ransomer was brought him by the Redeemer in person. Whatever its standing before history, the legend is perfect theology: no man shall outdo Christ in the courtesy of ransom.
He died on the thirty-first of August, 1240, aged about thirty-six.
Then — the traditions smile as they tell it — the living quarrelled over him, as men do over saints they neglected to imitate: the town of Cardona and his kinsfolk and his Order each claiming the body. The dispute was settled by an appeal to Providence of purest medieval simplicity: the body was set upon a blind mule, which was left to walk unguided; and the beast carried its burden to the chapel of St. Nicholas at Portell, where the shepherd boy had first served Our Lady, and there knelt and would go no farther. There he was buried; and over that chapel rose in time the great sanctuary of Sant Ramon, kept by his own Mercedarians, where the devotion of Catalonia — above all the devotion of mothers — has never cooled.
VIII. The cult
His veneration, immediate and local at first, spread with his Order through Spain and her world, and the childbearing patronage carried his name into every Spanish-speaking country, where Ramón remains among the commonest of Christian names. In 1657 Alexander VII, confirming the immemorial cult, inscribed him in the Roman Martyrology; and in the later seventeenth century his feast was extended to the universal Church, fixed upon his dies natalis, the thirty-first of August, where the traditional calendar keeps it still as a feast of the third class, with the Mass Os iusti of a Confessor and a proper Collect that gathers his whole life into a single petition.
For the Collect asks exactly what his history enacts: God made blessed Raymond mirabilis — wonderful — in liberandis fidelibus tuis ab impiorum captivitate, in the deliverance of the faithful from the captivity of the wicked; and we, invoking him, ask to be loosed a peccatorum vinculis — from the bonds of our sins — that we may do what pleases God liberis mentibus, with free minds. The Church, praying over his relics, universalizes his work: every soul in mortal sin is a captive in Algiers; every absolution is a ransom paid in Blood; and the freedom that matters is not of the wrists but of the will.
IX. What the life teaches
That ransom is the grammar of the Gospel. The Son of Man came to give his life a redemption for many (Matt. 20:28), and the Mercedarian fourth vow is nothing but that sentence taken at its word. Raymond’s substitution of himself for captives is startling only if we have forgotten that every Christian lives inside precisely such an exchange, purchased at a great price (1 Cor. 6:20). The saints differ from us not in being party to the transaction but in their willingness to imitate the Purchaser.
That the mouth is an instrument worth suffering for. His captors understood, better than a talkative age does, that speech is power: they could tolerate his presence but not his preaching. The padlock is a meditation for both directions of the tongue’s use — for the courage to speak Christ when silence would be safer, and for the discipline of silence when speech would wound. The Introit holds the balance: the just man’s tongue speaks judgment — not chatter, not venom, but truth weighed.
That God attends the extremities. Not born, but delivered; not free, but ransomed; not absolved by any priest at the end, but — so his children believe — communicated by Christ Himself. His whole story is of provision arriving at the point where human means give out. The mother dies and the child lives; the money fails and the vow suffices; the priest is absent and the Lord is not. It is a life constructed to teach the faithful where the bottom is: underneath are the everlasting arms (Deut. 33:27).
Practice
Examine. The padlock examines the tongue. One question, concretely: what did I say this week that I would not have said with St. Raymond’s lock upon my lips — and what did I fail to say of Christ because silence cost me nothing and speech might have cost me something?
Do. The Mercedarian work continues wherever a Christian spends his own liberty for a captive’s. Visit, write to, or materially assist someone imprisoned — in a jail, in a sickroom, in an addiction, in a house they cannot leave; or make a sacrificial alms for the persecuted Christians of our own day, who are Raymond’s proper clientele. And commend to him by name any expectant mother you know.
Pray. The Collect of the day:
Deus, qui in liberandis fidelibus tuis ab impiorum captivitate beatum Raymundum Confessorem tuum mirabilem effecisti: eius nobis intercessione concede; ut a peccatorum vinculis absoluti, quae tibi sunt placita, liberis mentibus exsequamur.
“O God, who didst make blessed Raymond Thy Confessor wonderful in the deliverance of Thy faithful from the captivity of the wicked: grant us by his intercession that, loosed from the bonds of our sins, we may with free minds perform the things that are pleasing to Thee.”
Devote. The Sorrowful Mysteries, offered for captives — the bound Christ ransoming the bound; or, for mothers with child, three Hail Marys to Our Lady of Ransom with the invocation Sancte Raymunde Nonnate, ora pro ea.
If you wish to go deeper: the Lives of the Saints path continues among the redeemers and their kin — St. Peter Nolasco, St. Raymond of Peñafort, St. John of Matha and the Trinitarian ransomers — and the Sacred Liturgy path will meet this Order again at the feast of Our Lady of Ransom on the twenty-fourth of September, where the Marian foundation of the whole work comes into its own.
Sancte Raymunde Nonnate, redemptor captivorum, patrone matrum parientium, ora pro nobis.
Sources consulted: the Roman Martyrology and the traditional accounts summarized in the Catholic Encyclopedia (1911), s.v. “St. Raymond Nonnatus” and “Order of Our Lady of Mercy”; Butler’s Lives of the Saints; the Acta Sanctorum (August, t. VI) for the Bollandist assessment; and the historical materials of the Mercedarian Order. The scarcity of contemporary documentation is noted in the text itself; elements resting on late tradition are labeled as such where they occur.