Feast, Patronage, and Iconography

The feast of Our Lady of Mercy is kept on 24 September, commemorating the founding of the order; a Mass and office of the title were granted to the Mercedarians and, in 1696, extended to the whole Latin Church. She is the patroness of Barcelona, whose great basilica of La Merced honours her, and her devotion spread widely through the Spanish world: she is a national patroness of the Dominican Republic (as Nuestra Senora de las Mercedes) and of Peru, and in Argentina she was honoured with the title of general of the army. Because of the order's work she is invoked as protector of captives and prisoners. In art she is shown in the white habit of the Mercedarians, crowned and often bearing the order's scapular and shield, and frequently holding broken chains or fetters and offering her mantle in protection, the emblems of ransom and liberation.

The title and the religious order that carries it trace to 1218 in Barcelona, where Peter Nolasco, according to tradition acting on a vision of the Virgin, founded a company of men dedicated to ransoming Christian captives held in Moorish Spain, encouraged by his confessor Raymond of Penyafort and protected by King James I of Aragon, who by the same tradition experienced a corresponding vision on the same night. The order Nolasco founded took a distinctive fourth vow, to give themselves as hostages in exchange for captives when ransom money ran short, and received papal approval first from Honorius III and then, more fully, from Gregory IX in 1230.