St. Raymond of Penyafort

A Catalan Dominican who organized the Decretals of Gregory IX — the foundation of canon law for the next seven hundred years. He was elected master general of the Dominicans at sixty-three and served reluctantly for two years before retiring to Catalonia, where he labored among Muslims and Jews and lived to be 100.

Born around 1175 near Barcelona, Raymond was already a distinguished professor of law at Bologna when he entered the Dominican Order at the age of forty-seven. Pope Gregory IX entrusted him with compiling and codifying the scattered decrees of councils and popes into a single authoritative collection — a monumental legal achievement that governed the Church until 1917.

In his long retirement he urged Thomas Aquinas to write the Summa contra Gentiles for the instruction of missionaries, and he founded schools of Arabic and Hebrew to prepare preachers for dialogue with non-Christians. He died in 1275 at Barcelona, nearly a century old, and was canonized in 1601 — the patron saint of canon lawyers.