St. John of God

St. John of God was born João Duarte Cidade on March 8, 1495, at Montemor-o-Novo in Portugal. He left home as a child under circumstances his early biographers never fully explain, and his first four decades were restless ones: shepherd in Spain, soldier of Charles V in wars against the French and the Turks, laborer, and peddler. The rough life of the camps wore away his faith, and he later looked back on those years with grief. Around the age of forty-two, working as a bookseller in Granada, he heard a sermon by the great preacher St. John of Ávila on the feast of St. Sebastian in 1537 (some accounts say 1539) and was seized by so violent a repentance that the city took him for a madman. He was confined in the Royal Hospital, where he experienced firsthand the chains, beatings, and neglect then inflicted on the mentally ill. John of Ávila became his spiritual director and steadied his fervor into a resolve: he would spend himself for the sick and abandoned whom no one else wanted. About 1539 he rented a house in Granada and filled it with the sick, the homeless, and the outcast, nursing them himself by day and begging for them by night. His practical innovations — separating patients by illness, caring for the mentally ill with gentleness — anticipated modern hospital care. Tradition relates that when the Royal Hospital caught fire in 1549 he carried patients out through the flames unharmed. Followers gathered around him, and after his death they were organized into the Order of the Brothers Hospitallers of St. John of God, approved in 1572, which today serves the sick in hospitals around the world. His final illness followed an act of charity: he leaped into the flooded Genil River to save a drowning young man and never recovered. He died in Granada on March 8, 1550, his fifty-fifth birthday — according to tradition, on his knees before an altar. Canonized by Pope Alexander VIII in 1690, he was declared, with St. Camillus de Lellis, patron of hospitals and the sick by Pope Leo XIII in 1886 and patron of nurses by Pope Pius XI in 1930. His feast is March 8, and his relics are venerated in the sumptuous Basilica of San Juan de Dios in Granada, in the city that once thought him mad and now claims him as its great almsgiver.