Who was St. Camillus de Lellis?
Camillus was born on May 25, 1550, at Bucchianico in the Abruzzo, in central Italy. The Camillian order's own account says he was born on Pentecost Sunday of that Holy Year to a "very elderly mother"; the Catholic Encyclopedia adds that she died while he was a child and that he grew up with little care. By his late teens he was a soldier of fortune, fighting for Venice and later Naples, including a campaign against the Turks in 1569, and he gambled away whatever he earned. The Encyclopedia calls him "a confirmed gambler." In the winter of 1574, Franciscan Media says, at twenty-four, he lost everything he had. The Camillians say he landed in Naples after a shipwreck, gambled himself to nothing and begged in the street, ashamed.
He also carried a wound that would not heal. Franciscan Media says a disease of his leg began at seventeen and stayed with him for life; the Encyclopedia speaks of abscesses in both feet; the Camillians say only that the wound "would not stop festering." Whatever it was, it sent him to Rome, to the Hospital of San Giacomo for Incurables, first as a patient and then as a worker. He was dismissed for quarreling and gambling.
Conversion came in 1575. Out of work, he hauled building materials for a Capuchin friary, leading donkeys. The Camillians say that on a trip to San Giovanni Rotondo during the Holy Year a friar urged him to save his soul, and that on the road home he broke down: "Lord, I have sinned. Forgive this great sinner!" Franciscan Media places the turning point in a sermon by the Capuchin superior at Manfredonia. He tried to become a Capuchin and was sent away because of the wound. So he went back to San Giacomo, this time to serve. He rose to be master of the house and reformed its care of patients. St. Philip Neri became his spiritual guide and told him to become a priest. He began Latin at thirty-two and, Franciscan Media says, was ordained at thirty-four.
In 1584 he gathered companions to serve the sick and the dying. The Encyclopedia says Pope Sixtus V confirmed the congregation in 1586 and Gregory XIV made it a religious order in 1591; Vatican News adds that Sixtus V authorized, on June 20, 1586, the red cross its members wear on their habit. The Ministers of the Sick, as he called them, vowed to serve the sick even in time of plague. The Camillians' history records what that cost. In the plague of 1630 more than a hundred of them served and fifty-six died; in 1656 and 1657, eighty-six died, including the superior general. The order's history puts it simply: "where there was plague, there were Camillians." During the famine of 1590 he fed more than 400 people a day in Rome, and at the Pope's request he sent religious to Hungary to nurse wounded soldiers. The order calls itself a precursor of the International Red Cross.
He left his friars written rules for serving the sick well and one sentence that sums them up: "More heart, I want to see more maternal affection." By the end of his life the order had fourteen houses and eight hospitals. He died in Rome on July 14, 1614, at sixty-four, leaving in his will the line, "I leave my body of earth to the same earth from which it was produced." He was beatified in 1742 and canonized by Benedict XIV in 1746.
Why Catholics pray to St. Camillus for healing
Here the patronage is not only traditional. Pope St. John Paul II, in a message to the Camillians dated May 15, 2000, records that Camillus was proclaimed patron of the sick and of hospitals by Leo XIII in 1886, and patron of health-care personnel by Pius XI in 1930. The editors of the online Catholic Encyclopedia add that Pius XI named him, together with St. John of God, principal co-patron of nurses; Franciscan Media, without giving a date, says that along with St. John of God he has been named patron of hospitals, nurses and the sick. We have not seen the 1886 and 1930 documents themselves, so we cite the Pope's message. Catholics pray to him for the sick, for nurses and doctors, for hospitals and for a good death.
What they are asking for is the kind of care he gave. He wanted his friars to serve the sick, John Paul II quoted him, "with the affection that a loving mother is wont to show her sick only child," and he called the sick "lords and masters." He also knew the other side of the bed: decades with an open wound, and before that, gambling and a temper that got him thrown out of a hospital. People who are sick, people exhausted from caring for someone sick, nurses on a bad shift, and anyone whose addiction has cost them everything can find themselves in him.
How to pray to St. Camillus
His optional memorial is July 14, the day of his death, on the General Roman Calendar. In the United States, where July 14 is the memorial of St. Kateri Tekakwitha, the USCCB calendar keeps St. Camillus on July 18, and Franciscan Media gives that date. A novena can be prayed on the nine days before either. Any night in a hospital is a good time.
Say the prayer below for the sick person by name, or for yourself. Ask the parish priest for the Anointing of the Sick, go to Confession, and ask that Communion be brought to the bedside. And keep every appointment: prayer to St. Camillus accompanies medical treatment and never replaces it. He spent his life making hospitals better, not emptier. If you are the one giving care, pray it for yourself too. "More heart" was his rule, and heart runs out unless it is refilled.