Our Lady of Ransom: The Men Who Took the Captive’s Place
The market on the coast
Picture a market on the coast of North Africa, some time in the thirteenth century. A man is standing where the buyers can see him. He was taken from a fishing boat, or from a village raided in the night, and he has been brought here to be sold. He has been told, in words he has learned to understand by now, that his life will be easier on the day he denies Christ. Some of the men who were taken with him have already done it.
Then a stranger arrives in a white habit. He has money with him that is not his own, and he begins to count it out.
That scene was repeated for centuries, in one port after another, because of a Lady who asked for it and a young Frenchman who did what she asked.
The young man from Languedoc
Saint Peter Nolasco was born in 1189 at Mas-des-Saintes-Puelles, in the south of France. He was born to money. At twenty-five he made over his estates to the Church and took a vow of chastity, which is to say that he arranged his life so that he would have nothing of his own left to lose.
He joined the army of Simon de Montfort in the campaign against the Albigensians, and was made tutor to the young king of Aragon, James, whose father had been killed at the battle of Muret. When the boy king went to Barcelona in 1215, Peter went with him.
In Barcelona he found a work already under way. Since 1192 a company of noblemen in the city had been caring for the sick in the hospitals and buying Christian captives back from the Moors. They called themselves Mercedarians, the men of mercy.
He joined them, and gave the work what he had left to give. Ransoming men is a trade like any other. There is a price, it is paid in coin, and the coin runs out.
The night of 1 August 1218
The date given for what happened next is the night of 1 August 1218 (The Leaven, 25 September 2019).
Our Lady came to Peter Nolasco and asked him for an order of her own. A religious order, under vows, whose whole work would be the ransom of Christians held by the Moors. The confraternity in Barcelona had done what it could for as long as its money lasted. What she asked for would still be standing when the money was gone.
The Mercedarian account has her coming the same night to his confessor, Saint Raymond of Peñafort, canon of the cathedral, and to the king. Three men, in three houses, were given the same instruction, and each of them had it confirmed by the other two.
The same account tells the founding like this. In the cathedral, the king asked the bishop’s blessing on the plan. The bishop laid the white habit on Peter Nolasco’s shoulders. And Peter, kneeling there, made the promise the order has carried ever since. He would give himself as a hostage, if it came to that.
The fourth vow
Religious take three vows: poverty, chastity and obedience. The men of Our Lady of Mercy took a fourth.
They bound themselves to stay behind in the prisons of North Africa, in the place of a captive, whenever the ransom fell short and a Christian’s faith was in danger. The captive would walk out. The friar would remain, and take whatever came to him there.
“Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13)
Saint Raymond Nonnatus, who died in 1240, is the most famous of the monks who gave themselves to that work. Saint Peter Paschal, bishop of Jaén, spent his energies on the ransom of captives and the conversion of the Moors, and was martyred in 1300.
The men who made that vow were promising their own bodies, and they knew it.
The order that grew out of it
The order was legally constituted at Barcelona in 1223, and Pope Gregory IX approved it on 17 January 1235 under the Rule of Saint Augustine (Catholic Encyclopedia, Feast of Our Lady of Ransom). Its house was the convent of Saint Eulalia in Barcelona, built in 1232.
Peter Nolasco was its first superior, with the title of Commander-General. He also held the office of Ransomer, which was the name the order gave to the man sent into Moorish territory to negotiate for prisoners. He resigned as superior seven years before his death in 1256.
Houses followed in France, England, Germany, Portugal and Spain, and as the Moors were driven back, new convents of Mercy were founded behind them. When Columbus sailed, Mercedarians sailed with him, and the order spread through Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, Peru, Chile and Ecuador.
They are still at work. As of 2023 there were nine provinces, on four continents, in twenty-two countries, with about eight hundred friars in solemn vows.
Why the Church keeps 24 September
The feast commemorates the foundation of the order.
It was kept first by the Mercedarians themselves, then in Spain, then in France. On 22 February 1696 it was extended to the whole Latin Church and fixed on 24 September (Catholic Encyclopedia, Feast of Our Lady of Ransom).
Our Lady of Ransom is the principal patron of Barcelona, and the city still keeps her day as its great festival. In the calendar of 1960 the day belongs to her under that title. It is no longer in the general calendar of the Church, and where 24 September is kept now it is kept as Our Lady of Mercy.
The captives you know
Our Lady of Ransom is the patroness of captives and prisoners, and the Church has never confined that title to men in chains.
In most parishes in this country there is a family with a space in the pew. The son was confirmed and has not been back except for a wedding. The daughter has stopped answering when the subject comes up. Nobody at home calls it captivity, because the word sounds dramatic and because the chains are invisible and the house is comfortable.
You will have someone in mind already. A son who has not been to Mass in fifteen years. A brother who cannot be talked out of the drink. A friend held by a habit he is ashamed of, or a grief he cannot put down, or a despair he will not say out loud. Somebody who is not free, and who cannot buy himself out.
What the Mercedarians understood is that captivity of that kind is not broken from a distance. Someone has to go in after them, and someone has to pay.
Seven hundred years after Barcelona, at Fatima, the same Lady asked for the same thing in a smaller coin. On 13 July 1917 she asked the three children to offer themselves for sinners, and gave them the words to use as they did it: “O Jesus, this is for love of Thee, for the conversion of sinners, and in reparation for the sins committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary.”
Nobody is asking you for a prison cell in Algiers. You are being asked for your Rosary, your sacrifices, and the name of one person you will not give up on.
What you can do today
Keep her feast. The twenty-fourth of September is the day the Church gave to Our Lady of Ransom, and a candle lit by her image, or her name said at grace, is enough to make it hers in your house.
Name your captive. Choose one person who is held by something, pray for them by name today, and do it again tomorrow. The Sub Tuum Praesidium is the oldest known prayer to Our Lady, and it asks for exactly this: “We fly to thy patronage, O holy Mother of God; despise not our petitions in our necessities, but deliver us always from all dangers, O glorious and blessed Virgin. Amen.”
Offer one sacrifice for that person, and say the words Our Lady gave at Fatima while you offer it.
Have a Mass offered for somebody who has left the Faith. Nothing you can do for a soul you cannot reach is stronger.
A prayer
The prayer of her feast asks for the deliverance the Mercedarians went into the prisons to buy:
O God, who by means of the most glorious Mother of Thy Son was pleased to give new children to Thy Church for the deliverance of Christ’s faithful from the power of the heathen; grant, we beseech Thee, that we who love and honour her as the foundress of so great a work may, by her merits and intercession, be ourselves delivered from all sin and from the bondage of the evil one. Through the same Christ, our Lord. Amen.
Our Lady of Ransom, pray for us.
Saint Peter Nolasco, pray for us.
References
1. No Greater Love: Our Lady of Mercy and Her Mercedarians - America Needs Fatima
2. Nobility.org, “Our Lady of Mercy”, 23 September 2013.
3. Catholic Encyclopedia, “Feast of Our Lady of Ransom”, F. G. Holweck. For the constitution of the order at Barcelona, its approval by Gregory IX on 17 January 1235, the extension of the feast to the whole Latin Church on 22 February 1696, and Our Lady of Ransom as principal patron of Barcelona.
4. Catholic Culture, “St. Peter Nolasco”. For his estates and for the treatment of Christian captives in North Africa.
5. The Leaven, “Our Lady of Ransom”, 25 September 2019. For the apparition of 1 August 1218 to Saint Peter Nolasco, Saint Raymond of Peñafort and King James I of Aragon.
6. Catholic Culture, “Prayer for the Feast of Our Lady of Ransom”. For the text of the prayer above.
Last updated: 23 September 2026 08:29