CAMILLO de LELLIS, Saint. — Born in Bucchianico di Chieti on 25 May 1550 into a noble Abruzzese family. As a boy and then a young man, he displayed unruly energy: fond of games, intolerant of discipline, and reluctant to apply himself to study or hard work. Having lost his mother at thirteen and his father at seventeen, he lived a wandering life until the age of twenty-five, amid risks and military adventures on land and sea in Dalmatia and Africa, in the service of Venice and later Spain. Yet he was more driven by a craving for amusement than inspired or emboldened by visions of glory. A wound to his foot forced him to seek treatment at the Hospital of the Incurables of St James in Rome. Once recovered, he returned to war and gambling, losing everything he had. In the autumn of 1574, to avoid begging, he reluctantly took work as a labourer in a Capuchin construction site in Manfredonia. On 2 February 1575, after fierce resistance, he yielded to grace. He asked for and received the habit of the Capuchins, but his wound obliged him to return to St James, where his vocation to charity matured (1575–84). Rejected a second time by the Capuchins, he dedicated himself to serving the sick, gradually tempering and directing the ardent resources of his nature—strengthened by an iron will—toward this merciful goal, though Philip Neri, who sought to moderate his spirit, never managed to curb his impetuosity and zeal. In 1584, resolved to found a company of devout men who would consecrate themselves, out of love for God, to caring for the sick, he was ordained a priest. On 15 September of that same year he clothed the first companions in the religious habit. On 18 March 1586 Sixtus V approved the Company of C., called the “Ministers of the Sick” (v.), and granted it the right to wear a red cross sewn on the chest of the habit and on the cloak. That same year the Company took possession of the House and Church of St Mary Magdalene in Rome, the mother house of the Order. There, on 8 December 1591, C. made profession, together with twenty-five companions, of the three solemn vows, adding a fourth vow to care for the sick, even those afflicted by plague, following the bull of Gregory XIV that elevated the Company to the status of a religious Order of Regular Clerics.
From 1588 C. founded other houses in Naples, Milan, Genoa, Florence, Bologna, Mantua, Ferrara, Messina, Palermo, Viterbo, Chieti, Bucchianico, and Borgonuovo, accepting wherever possible the task of caring for the sick in hospitals and the dying in their homes. He himself established new hospitals, including one in Rome with seven hundred beds near the Bocca della Verità. For forty years C. devoted his life unreservedly to the service of the poor and the sick. He entered every field of charity with superhuman zeal. Through his efforts and those of his followers, hospitals were transformed. He drew up wise rules “to serve the sick with every perfection,” and the wounded on battlefields, where his red cross first appeared in 1596 at Strogonia in Hungary, in the service of the army of Francesco Aldobrandini. In Rome, during times of famine, epidemic, and flood, he organized emergency relief with immediate insight into needs, flawless technique, and abundant resources, guided by innate genius sharpened into supernatural instinct by charity.
In 1607, after twenty-two years, he resigned the governance of his Order in order to devote himself entirely to charity. He died in Rome at the Magdalene on 14 July 1614 and is buried there. He was canonized by Benedict XIV in 1746; by Leo XIII proclaimed in 1886 as the heavenly “Patron of all the Sick and Hospitals”; and by Pius XI in 1930 as “Protector of all Nurses.” His feast is celebrated by the Universal Church on 18 July.