St. Raymond of Peñafort
January 7th, 2008 by Fr. Pius, OP
Today, the Dominican Order celebrates the feast of St. Raymond of Peñafort, a Dominican friar whose life spanned a century, from 1175 to 1275. St. Raymond was known in his day as a brilliant canon lawyer and is the patron of canon lawyers. In the Dominican House of Studies today, the homily below was preached in honor of this great Lawyer saint:
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers” so said Dick the Butcher, in one of Shakespeare’s most oft-abused lines. [Henry VI, Part I] Shakespeare never intended these sentiments of Dick to be lauded. To the contrary, these are words spoken in support of rebellion –to create instability as an aid to the Duke of York’s plan to overthrow the King. Dick seeks to convince the amassed rabble that he offers a better way – the utopia of anarchy where all will be clothed and fed, housed and entertained, all on the mere promise of their new leader. But this new Eden can begin only when the lawyers can no longer enforce their pesky rules on property and ownership.
For Dick, true freedom comes when the burden of law is removed, only then can the paradise of man’s promise be achieved. But Dick offers a false freedom – an autonomy of desire freed only from reason and freed only for itself.
Dick’s seditious words in this play are perhaps best answered by another play. In Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, Thomas More and his future son-in-law Roper argue whether the law should be set aside to punish the wicked – should the forest of laws be cut down to more easily find the devil? Roper thinks so, to which More replies, “And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast – man’s laws, not God’s – and if you cut them down, … d’you think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake”
If the law is a forest shielding our freedom, its foresters are lawyers. And history has seen few better than our brother Raymond of Peñafort. Active in the thirteenth century this learned man came to our Order somewhat late in life – he was 47 when he took the habit of St. Dominic, less than a year after St. Dominic’s own death. When he entered our Order he was already a well established canonist, associated with the great medieval school of canon law in Bologna.
And the thirteenth century was a tough time to be a canonist. The forest of laws had become a dense and winding thicket. Church laws were collections of canons and decrees, edicts and bulls. It was an ever more complicated array of confusing and contrary laws. And so when Pope Gregory IX turned his attention to this chaos of legal confusion, it was not terribly surprising that he turned to Raymond. For four years Raymond labored to provide a systematic and scientific collection of the laws of the Church. So impressed was the Pope with the work of our brother, that he decreed that Raymond’s compilation alone would be considered authoritative. And though, through the centuries, the collection of laws grew to meet the needs of the times, the Decretals of friar Raymond remained their foundation up to modern times. It was only with the passage of the Pio-Benedictine Code of 1917 that Raymond’s work was replaced, although hardly surpassed.
As a good lawyer, St. Raymond knew that man’s freedom rests on good law. Men like Roper and Dick the butcher, seek to pit the will’s desire against the law’s reason. But reason and desire are meant not to be at odds, but to come together for the good of the whole person, the whole body of people. This is most perfectly true, of course, in God himself, God whose reason is his will. The divine Eternal Law is not the mere whim of a jealous God, but the expression of the purest reason. And God has given to man in the Natural Law the privilege to participate in this Divine Wisdom. Upon this must be built the system of man’s laws – civil and ecclesiastical – by which our relations within society are guided to bring about our common good. Now, of course, the life of charity, grace, and charisms have primacy in the Church and the individual. But, as Pope John Paul II said in promulgating the 1983 Code: it is the law that renders their organic development easier in the life of the Church and in men. Thus, it is under this canopy of laws that we travel, protected from the elements, as we seek our proper end.
And so this evening, after we’ve said the last prayers of the night, we should, each of us, take down our copy of the Code of Canon Law, dust off its pages, and meditate on a few of its sublime passages. In doing so, we should be thankful for men like St. Raymond of Penafort, St. Thomas More, St. Charles Borromeo, Bl. Frederick Ozanam – lawyers who labored for our benefit so that we may walk in the cool and gentle breeze of the forest of our freedom.
