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 Pope Gregory IX Promulgating the Decretals International Juridical Congress Issue Scott 44-46 (1935) January 7 marks the Feast of Saint Raymond of Penafort on the Liturgical Calendar. Saint Raymond played an important role in the development of Church doctrine in the 13th century. Although not specifically identified in the stamps shown above, he is seen kneeling before Pope Gregory IX and presenting the pope his Decretals in 1274. The design of the stamp is taken from the fresco of Raphael entitled Gregory IX Approving the Decretals, which is located in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican:  Pope Gregory IX approving the Decretals, by Raphael At the Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican City Photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen From Wikimedia Commons (in the public domain) Born in Spain in 1175, Raymond was born into a noble family, and, by the age of 20, he had received a superior education and was a teacher of philosophy. He went on to earn his doctorate in both canon and civil law. He joined the Dominican Order at age 41 and would eventually be recruited by Pope Gregory IX to come to Rome to work with him and to serve as his confessor. Raymond was tasked by the pope with rearranging and codifying the elements of canon law. One hundred years earlier, Gratian had published the first such compilation in his Decretum, but numerous papal decrees had been issued and scattered among many publications since that time, and they needed to be organized into one set of documents. Raymond’s work, call the Decretals, was a five-volume set that would come to be viewed as the most organized collection of Church law of that time. His work served as the ‘gold standard’ for canon law until 1917, when, under the direction of Pope Pius X, canon law was officially codified under the '1917 Code of Canon Law (also called the Pio-Benedictine Code). In addition to the Decretals, Raymond also compiled what could be considered a ‘case study’ collection of problems and situations presented to confessors entitled the Summa de Casibus Poenitentiae. Rather than being a list of sins and penances, the Summa connected these problems to Church doctrine and discussed rational solutions to problems and cases brought before the confessor. At the age of 63, after serving briefly as the archbishop of Tarragona, Raymond was selected to succeed Saint Dominic de Guzman as the head of the Dominican Order. In 1275, Saint Raymond died at the age of 100. The three stamps at the top of the article (Scott 44-46) are part of the six-stamp set from 1935 commemorating the 1934 International Juridical Congress held in Rome. The three stamps shown are the high-value stamps from the set. REFERENCES: |
