Blessed Raymond of Capua

Raymond of Capua, (ca. 1303 – 5 October 1399) was a leading member of the Dominican Order and served as its Master General from 1380 until his death. First as Prior Provincial of Lombardy and then as Master General of the Order, Raymond undertook the restoration of Dominican religious life. For his success in this endeavor, he is referred to as its "second founder". Raymond worked also for the return of the papacy to Rome and for a solution to the Western schism. The important mystic and author, Catherine of Siena, accepted him as a spiritual director because of his burning passion for the Church and for the revival of religious life. He was beatified by the Catholic Church in 1899. He was born "Raymond della Vigna" about 1330 in Capua (then part of the Kingdom of Naples), a member of a prominent family of that city, and was a descendant of Pietro della Vigna (a figure mentioned 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 of the Order. Raymond was first assigned to Montepulciano, where he served as a chaplain to a monastery of nuns of the Dominican Second Order. He was the first biographer of their venerated former prioress, Agnes of Montepulciano, 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. Raymond spent the next six years advising her and hearing her confessions. 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 in 1374.