Life
Sources for the origins of the Mercedarians are scant and almost nothing is known of the founder, St. Peter Nolasco. A narrative developed between the fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries that culminated in Nolasco's canonization as a saint in 1628. The two earliest accounts, those written by the mid-fifteenth-century Mercedarian chroniclers Nadal Gaver and Pedro Cijar, declare the founder, the son of a merchant, to be from the French village of Mas-Saintes-Puelles, near the town of Castelnaudary, in the modern department of Aude. A fuller account of his life by Francisco Zumel appeared in 1588 and is the basis for the biography given in the Acta sanctorum. Here Nolasco is given an aristocratic lineage, and his credentials as a Catalan figure are established with a report of the migration of the young Pere's family to Barcelona.
According to Butler, Nolasco followed Simon of Montfort, in the war against the Albigensians. In the battle of Muret Montfort defeated and killed Peter, king of Arragon, and took his son James prisoner, a child of six years old and sent him back to Aragon with Peter Nolasco, then twenty-five years old, appointed his tutor.
All the biographers agree that at some point in his youth Nolasco became concerned with the plight of Christians captured in Moorish raids and that he decided to establish a religious order to succor these unfortunates.
Read more about this topic: Peter Nolasco
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Life isnt meant to be easy. Its hard to take being on the topor on the bottom. I guess Im something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things.... Life is one crisis after another.”
—Richard M. Nixon (19131995)
“... life is moral responsibility. Life is several other things, we do not deny. It is beauty, it is joy, it is tragedy, it is comedy, it is psychical and physical pleasure, it is the interplay of a thousand rude or delicate motions and emotions, it is the grimmest and the merriest motley of phantasmagoria that could appeal to the gravest or the maddest brush ever put to palette; but it is steadily and sturdily and always moral responsibility.”
—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (18441911)
“Thus far women have been the mere echoes of men. Our laws and constitutions, our creeds and codes, and the customs of social life are all of masculine origin. The true woman is as yet a dream of the future. A just government, a humane religion, a pure social life await her coming.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (18151902)