St. Raymond Nonnatus

Raymond Nonnatus — the surname meaning not-born, referring to the tradition that he was delivered from his mother's womb by Caesarean section after her death in childbirth — was a Mercedarian who took the order's fourth vow to its most extreme literal consequence, and whose biography represents the purest single embodiment of the Mercedarian charism.

He entered the Order of Our Lady of Mercy under Peter Nolasco and was sent to North Africa to ransom Christian slaves. When his funds were exhausted and he had no money left to pay for more releases, he offered himself as a hostage in exchange for the freedom of remaining captives. He was held by his captors for eight months. During that captivity, the tradition records, he preached to his fellow prisoners and to the Muslim population of the area around him with such effect that the captors bored a hole through his lips and padlocked his mouth to prevent him from speaking. The specific silencing of the preacher by the most physical possible means is a dramatic statement about what his captors found threatening.

He was eventually ransomed by the Mercedarians and returned to Spain, where Peter Nolasco put him forward for the cardinalate — Gregory IX made him a cardinal in 1239 — but he died in the same year, at about thirty-six, at Cardona in Catalonia before he could set out again for Africa. He was canonized in 1657.

His story is the most complete expression of what the Mercedarian vow meant when it was lived rather than merely professed: the man who not only paid ransom but became the ransom, who offered his own freedom — and his voice, when his captors took it — for the freedom of others.