Joan Gilabert Jofré

Initially, the Order's work was carried out in Valencia and the Balearic Islands, because of their proximity, but as the Spanish Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula proceeded, captives were redeemed from slavery further afield, in Andalusia and North Africa.

Even while holding the relatively lowly office of vicar of the Mercedarians' convent in Lérida, he was a sufficiently respected figure by 1391 to be able to appeal to King Juan I for support for his efforts to redeem captives and hostages.

Pare Jofré's missions to rescue captives in Muslim Spain and North Africa are thought to have given him an insight into the different way the mentally ill were treated in Islamic communities.

After rescuing the injured victim and taking him back to his convent, he returned towards the cathedral and preached a memorable sermon that urged the establishment of a charitable institution to care for and treat the mentally ill and other outcasts.

[7] Pare Jofré's other social works included the founding of a hospice for abandoned children in Valencia in 1410 and the establishment of a hostel for impoverished pilgrims at El Puig in 1416.

[7] Joan's initiative, which provided the mentally ill with medical treatment, albeit precarious, and with a residence where they could live safely, was not an island in an ocean of indifference but rather spread to other parts of Spain, giving continuity to a way of assisting these patients.

[7] Efforts to secure Pare Jofré's canonization as a saint of the Roman Catholic Church were frustrated in the early 19th century and the 1930s when the supporting documentation was destroyed, on the first occasion by invading Napoleonic forces and on the second in anti-religious disturbances at the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936.