Saint Raymond of Peñafort

Saint Raymond of Peñafort's memorial was on Thursday, in this season of Epiphanytide. I know of him as a high intellectual and a church lawyer - a good reminder to us all that as a human society, the Church has a law of her own to maintain order and to preserve the rights of her members from being subverted, even by her own authorities. The current iteration of Church law is, with some changes, the major revision ordered by the Holy Father John Paul II in the 80s. You may find it here. But back to Saint Raymond, the patron Saint of Church lawyers.

My source in this paragraph is the online Catholic encyclopedia. Raymond was born near Barcelona in AD 1175, and by his 20th year was already a professor of Church law. He left for Bologna in northern Italy, which had a splendid university, one of the best in that time. There, Raymond held the chair of canon law for three years, achieving great distinction. But, also in Bologna was (and remains today) one of the great houses of the Order of Preachers, the Dominicans, and Raymond entered that Order, once he had returned to Barcelona in 1222. In Barcelona, he also founded the Order of the Mercedarians with Saint Peter Nolasco, and worked for the conversion of Jews and Moslems to the Catholic Faith. As a Dominican, he remained one of the finest canon lawyers of his day. In 1229, he was appointed as personal theologian to the cardinal archbishop of Sabina, John of Abbeville, and within a year was in Rome, appointed chaplain and grand penitentiary to the Holy Father Gregory IX. Now he worked with the Holy Father to reorganise the written law of the Church; this was a major task, since canon law collects itself over time into multiple reference libraries, many of these individual collections containing common material many times copied, and also material that contradicted previously published material. And then there are items that stray away from collections, but are nonetheless referenced. Saint Raymond's effort was promulgated in a Bull by the Holy Father in 1231, that declared it to be the authoritative work to be used by the schools of law; this work was in constant use for centuries until 1917, when it was abrogated and replaced with the Code of Canon Law of the Holy Fathers Pius X and Benedict XV. And now the Holy Father made as to appoint Raymond archbishop of Tarragona, which dignity he promptly refused. He attempted to escape back home to Spain, but was elected master General of the Dominican Order in 1238, only the third in the history of that at-the-time quite young Order. He soon resigned from that post, but only after ordering and revising the Constitutions of the Order. Saint Raymond died at Barcelona in 1275, and was canonised by the Holy Father Clement VIII in 1601.