Camillo de Lellis, Saint

CAMILLO DE LELLIS, saint. — Born at Bucchianico di Chieti on 25 May 1550 to a noble Abruzzese family. As a child and then as a youth, he displayed an undisciplined vivacity: fond of games, impatient of discipline, and reluctant to apply himself to study and work. Having lost his mother at 13 and his father at 17, until the age of 25 he led a wandering life amid the dangers and military adventures of land and sea, in Dalmatia and Africa, in the service first of Venice and then of Spain, but more eager and intent on amusement than attracted and elated by visions of glory. A sore on one foot obliged him to enter the hospital of S. Giacomo degli Incurabili in Rome. Once recovered, he returned to war and gambling, to which he exposed and lost everything. In the autumn of 1574, rather than beg, he resigned himself to working as a laborer at a Capuchin building site in Manfredonia. On 2 February 1575, after vigorous 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 devoted himself to serving the sick, gradually tempering and disciplining the arduous resources of his nature, strengthened by an iron will, toward the achievement of his compassionate purpose, although Filippo Neri, who moderated his spirit, was not always able to contain his force and ardor. In 1584, with the intention of founding a Company of devout men who would consecrate themselves, for the love of God, to caring for the sick, he became a priest. On 15 September of the same year he gave the religious habit to his first companions. On 18 March 1586 Sisto V approved the Company of C., called that of the « Ministers of the Sick » (v.), to which he granted the right to wear a red cross sewn onto the habit on the breast and on the mantle. That 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 December 1591, C., together with 25 companions, pronounced the profession of the three solemn vows, to which he added a fourth, to assist the sick, even those afflicted by plague, following the bull of Gregorio XIV that elevated 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, and Borgonuovo, accepting, wherever permitted, the care of the sick in hospitals and of the dying in their homes. He himself established new hospitals, including one in Rome with 700 beds at Bocca della Verità. For 40 years C. devoted his life to the poor and the sick, without limits or reservations. He entered every field of charity with superhuman ardor. Through his efforts and those of his companions, the hospitals were transformed. He tested and formulated wise rules « per servire con ogni perfettione i malati », and the wounded on battlefields, where his red cross first appeared in 1596 at Strigonia in Hungary, accompanying the army of Francesco Aldobrandini. In Rome, during a famine, epidemic, or flood, he organized emergency relief with an immediate perception of needs, perfect technique, and abundant resources, through an innate genius rendered supernatural by charity. In 1607, after 22 years, he renounced the government of his Order in order to devote himself exclusively to charity. He died in Rome on 14 July 1614, at the Maddalena, where he is buried. He was canonized by Benedetto XIV in 1746; in 1886 Leone XIII proclaimed him the heavenly « Patron of all the Sick and Hospitals »; and in 1930 Pio XI named him « Protector of all Nurses ». His feast is celebrated by the Universal Church on 18 July.