St. Camillus of Lellis

St. Camillus de Lellis was born on May 25, 1550, at Bucchianico in the Abruzzo region of Italy. A giant of a man, he followed his father into life as a soldier of fortune, fighting for Venice against the Turks, and fell into a ruinous addiction to gambling that at one point left him literally without the shirt on his back. He also carried an incurable wound on his leg that would afflict him all his life. Nothing in his violent, dissolute youth suggested the saint he would become, which is precisely why generations of the sick, the struggling, and the ashamed have found hope in him. In 1575, at the age of twenty-five, while working as a laborer for a Capuchin friary, Camillus experienced a profound conversion. He twice sought to enter the Capuchins, but his leg wound barred him from religious life. Instead he went to Rome and gave himself to the hospital of San Giacomo for incurables, first as a patient, then as a servant of the sick, and eventually as superintendent. Under the spiritual direction of St. Philip Neri, he saw in every suffering patient the person of Christ, and he resolved to gather companions who would serve the sick out of pure love rather than for wages. Ordained a priest in 1584, Camillus founded the Order of the Ministers of the Infirm, known as the Camillians, whose members wear a large red cross on their cassocks — a sign that centuries later helped inspire the modern emblem of medical care. To the three traditional vows his religious added a fourth: to serve the sick, even the plague-stricken, at the risk of their own lives. Camillus insisted on standards of care that were revolutionary for his time, from fresh air and proper diet to attentive spiritual accompaniment of the dying, and his priests and brothers served on battlefields in what is often described as the first military field ambulance corps. Having resigned as superior general to serve the sick with his own hands despite his failing body, Camillus died in Rome on July 14, 1614. He was beatified in 1742 and canonized in 1746 by Pope Benedict XIV. Pope Leo XIII declared him, with St. John of God, patron of the sick and of hospitals, and Pope Pius XI named him a patron of nurses and nursing associations. His feast is celebrated on July 14, and his remains are venerated in the church of St. Mary Magdalene (La Maddalena) in Rome, near an enduring worldwide family of Camillian religious who still serve the sick in his spirit.