Saint Camillus de Lellis

Camillus de Lellis knew bodily pain to the full: for thirty-six years he lived with an open wound in his foot that never healed. But instead of letting it make him bitter, he let that pain teach him to bend down and tend the wounds of others with all the love of a gentle mother.

He founded the Ministers of the Sick, usually called the Camillians, who make a heroic fourth vow: to serve the sick even at the risk of their own lives in times of contagious disease.

Trouble came early: his gentle mother died when he was only thirteen, and his father was always away at war. Lacking his mother’s care and guidance, Camillus grew up unruly and reckless. At nineteen, he followed his father into the armies of the Republic of Venice and the Spanish Empire, becoming a hardened mercenary.

After his father’s sudden death at war, the young soldier sank deeper and deeper into a dissolute life. Gambling took hold of him like a madness: once he lost all his pay, his sword and weapons, his officer’s coat, and finally even the shirt off his back in the bitter winter of Naples.

He made his way to Rome and was admitted for treatment to the Hospital of San Giacomo degli Incurabili — Saint James’s Hospital for the incurable, a large institution that Pope Leo X himself had raised to one of the city’s great hospitals in 1515. To pay for his treatment and keep, Camillus asked to work as an attendant caring for other patients in the hospital.

It was here that Camillus saw a cruelty that broke his heart: at that time, most of the attendants in public hospitals were scoundrels and released prisoners hired for a pittance. They treated the sick with great cruelty: cursing, beating and starving them, too lazy to change dressings or wash them, leaving the sick lying in excrement crawling with maggots. Some even threw people who were still barely alive into the morgue to steal their belongings.

The newly converted soldier’s heart ached. He prayed earnestly:

“Lord, if only I had a company of men who would work not for earthly wages, but for the love of Jesus, to care for these suffering sick people with the love of a gentle mother!”

Through his extraordinary dedication, Camillus gradually won the trust of the hospital authorities and was given responsibility for running it — becoming the “master of the house” of the whole institution, with full authority to reorganize the care of the sick.

Turning down a comfortable post as a diocesan priest, he gathered a group of friends who shared his ideal and formally founded the Ministers of the Sick in 1586. Pope Sixtus V approved the congregation and granted its members the privilege of wearing a red cloth cross on the chest of their black habit — a public sign that they were soldiers of the love of the Cross, always ready to shed their blood for the lives of others.

Father Camillus brought about a revolution in the care of the sick: he set the standard that

• each patient must have a separate, clean bed with a warm mattress and sheets changed regularly;
• the sickrooms must always be well aired, with windows open to the sunlight;
• food must be prepared to suit each patient’s condition;
• and most important of all, when caring for the sick, the religious must see Christ Himself suffering in their bodies.

He gave his brothers a rule to learn by heart:

“When you touch the body of a sick person, touch it with the tenderness and reverence with which you would touch the Body of the Lord! Serve the sick with the heart of a mother caring for her only child in pain!”

They went from house to house, carrying plague victims barely clinging to life on their backs to the infirmary. They washed sore-covered bodies reeking of death, gave them water spoonful by spoonful, and gently closed the eyes of the dying. When the hospitals were overwhelmed, he turned his own house into a place to receive the sick. In those epidemics, many young Camillians caught the disease and died as martyrs of charity.

Beyond the hospitals, Father Camillus was also the first in history to set up military ambulance units serving right on the battlefield: in 1595 and 1601, when the imperial armies fought the Turks in Hungary and Croatia, he sent religious wearing the Red Cross to the front lines to bandage and give first aid to the wounded of both sides, without distinguishing friend from foe — a humanitarian spirit that came nearly three hundred years before Henry Dunant’s International Red Cross.

Most moving of all, he himself endured terrible bodily pain every day: the ulcer on his foot never healed and constantly oozed pus and blood; on top of that, kidney stones and a hernia tormented him, so that every step felt like treading on thorns. Yet the big man still leaned on his stick and limped from one sickbed to another to comfort others.

In May 1614, knowing his strength was spent, he asked to resign as Superior General to prepare to meet God. Lying sick at the house of Saint Mary Magdalene in Rome, he asked his brothers to read him the Gospel of the Passion of Jesus.

In Vietnam, the Camillians are much loved for their centers for people in the final stages of HIV/AIDS, their charity clinics, and their care for poor patients at the bedside in Đồng Nai and many other provinces.