CAMILLUS DE LELLIS, santo. - Born at Bucchianico di Chieti on 25 May 1550 into a noble Abruzzese family. As a boy, and then as a youth, he showed an unruly liveliness: fond of games, impatient of discipline and reluctant toward any application of study or effort. Having lost his mother at 13 and his father at 17, he lived, until the age of 25, a vagabond life, amid risks and warlike adventures by land and sea, in Dalmatia and in Africa, in the pay of Venice and then of Spain, but more eager and frantic for amusement than enticed and made proud by mirages of glory. A sore on one foot obliged him to enter treatment at S. Giacomo degli Incurabili in Rome. Once recovered, he returned to war and to gambling, to which he exposed everything, losing it. In the autumn of 1574, in order not to beg, he resigned himself to serving as a laborer in a Capuchin building site at Manfredonia. On 2 Feb. 1575, after lively resistance, he yielded to Grace. He asked for and obtained the Capuchin habit; but the sore forced him to return to S. Giacomo, where his vocation to charity matured (1575-84). Refused a second time by the Capuchins, he consecrated himself to the service of the sick, gradually tempering and educating the arduous resources of his nature, strengthened by an iron will, toward the achievement of his merciful purpose, without Philip Neri, who moderated his spirit, managing each time to contain his impetuosity and ardor. In 1584, with the intention of founding a Company of God-fearing men who would consecrate themselves for the love of God to the care of the sick, he had himself ordained a priest. On 15 Sept. of the same year he gave the religious habit to his first companions. On 18 March 1586 Sixtus V approved the Company of C., called that of the « Ministers of the Sick » (v.), to which he granted the right to wear on the breast, sewn to the habit, and on the cloak a red cross. In the same year the Company took possession of the House and Church of the Maddalena in Rome, the mother house of the Order. There, on 8 Dec. 1591, C. pronounced, with 25 companions, the profession of the three solemn vows, to which he added a fourth, of assistance to the sick, even when plague-stricken, following the bull of Gregory XIV which raised the Company to 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, Borgonuovo, accepting, wherever he was permitted, the care of the sick in hospitals, and of the dying in their homes. He himself erected new hospitals, one of them in Rome with 700 beds at Bocca della Verità. For 40 years C. placed his life at the service of the poor and the sick, without limits or reservations. He entered every field of charity with superhuman ardor. The hospitals, through his work and that of his followers, changed their face. He tested and dictated wise rules « in order to serve the sick with all perfection », and the wounded on the battlefields, where his red cross made its first appearance in 1596 at Strigonia in Hungary, in the train of the army of Francesco Aldobrandini. In Rome in times of famine, epidemic, flood, he organized emergency relief with immediate intuition of needs, perfect technique and abundance of means, with an innate genius made supernatural by charity. In 1607, after 22 years, he renounced the government of his Order, in order to attend only to charity. He died in Rome, on 14 July 1614, at the Maddalena, where he is buried. He was canonized by Benedict XIV in 1746, proclaimed by Leo XIII in 1886 heavenly « Patron of all the Sick and Hospitals », and by Pius XI in 1930 « Protector of all Nurses ». His feast is celebrated by the Universal Church on 18 July.
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Mario Vanti