Raymond of Capua

Raymond of Capua, O.P., (ca. 1330 – 5 October 1399) was a leading member of the Dominican Order and served as its Master General from 1380 until his death; he was beatified in 1899, and is referred to with the prefix "Blessed". As Prior Provincial of Lombardy and then as Master General of the Order itself, Raymond undertook the restoration of Dominican religious life. For his success in this endeavor, he could be considered a "second founder" of the Order.

He worked also for the return of the papacy to Rome and for a solution to the Western schism. St. Catherine of Siena accepted him as a spiritual director because of his burning passion for the Church and for the revival of the religious life.

Life

Born in Capua, Italy, about 1330, Raymond was a member of the Della Vigna family, prominent in the city, and a descendant of Pietro della Vigna, remembered in Dante's Divine Comedy. In 1350, while a student of law at the University of Bologna, he entered the Dominican Order. For the next twenty-five years he worked as a spiritual director or as a teacher in various communities communities of the Order.

First he was assigned to Montepulciano, where he served as a chaplain to a monastery of nuns of the Order. He was the first biographer of their venerated former prioress, Mother Agnes, who had died about fifty years earlier. He was then stationed in Rome, to serve as the prior of the friars at Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Later he was sent to Siena, where he was assigned by the Master General to be the spiritual director and confessor to the noted Dominican tertiary, Catherine of Siena. Apparently this was a task which he accepted with less than enthusiasm, as he had doubts about her.

He spent the next six years advising and hearing her confidences. While there, Raymond gradually learned to trust her holiness and her judgment. This was sealed when he became involved in nursing victims of a plague of 1374. When he contracted the disease himself and lay near death, Catherine came and sat at his bedside until he recovered. Knowing how close he was to death, Raymond credited his recovery to her prayers.

By 1374 he had come to the attention of the popes in his position as spiritual director and confessor of St. Catherine of Siena, and also for his novel ways of confronting problems like the Crusades in the Holy Land, the return of the popes to Rome, and the general reform of the Church. He was well-known for his ability to pass seamlessly from dealing with spiritual and supernatural considerations to the more mundane matters of practical politics. For four years Raymond accompanied Catherine in her journeys, and went to Avignon to act as an intermediary between her and Pope Gregory XI. Catherine had such faith in the commitment of the Pope to the cause of a Crusade, that she sent a personal letter to the infamous English pirate, John Hawkwood, asking him to re-direct his efforts to the service of God in this cause.

Pope Gregory would finally return to Rome in 1377. But he died in 1378, and the election of his successor, Pope Urban, led to the Western schism that lasted 39 years, with one pope in Rome and another in Avignon. This schism divided Europe. Raymond, like Catherine, supported the Roman Papacy, and defended its legitimacy.

In the year 1380, Catherine died and Raymond was elected Master General of Dominican Order. He then divided his time between Italy and Germany. In the Caterinian spirit of reform, he gave a new spiritual vitality to the order. Raymond favored the development of a new interpretation of "observance", for which he drew upon the Franciscan example. "In this work he deserved the designation of being the second founder of the order of the Preachers."

Veneration

He was buried first in Nuremberg (now Germany) where he died, but his body was later moved to Naples, to the Church of San Domenico Maggiore. In 1899 Pope Leo XIII beatified him on the 500th anniversary of his death.^[1]

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