Saint John of God

That man was John of God (Juan de Dios), founder of the Hospitaller Order of Saint John of God, the Brothers who care for the sick.

His life is an extraordinary story of conversion. He was a runaway child, a hardened mercenary and a traveling bookseller, until at last he was “captured” by the love of Christ crucified and became a pioneer of humane care for the mentally ill.

The boy drifted all the way to Spain, where a farm manager at Oropesa kindly took him in as a shepherd. He grew up in the countryside, simple and strong.

As a young man, hungry for adventure, João joined the Spanish royal army and fought as a mercenary in fierce wars against the French and the Turks.

The rough life of a soldier drew him into carousing and gambling, and he drifted away from the faith. Once he was nearly hanged, unjustly, for losing a chest of army supplies; another time he was thrown from his horse and nearly killed in battle. João began to sense how fragile life is and how God’s providence had kept him alive.

After leaving the army, he kept on wandering: herding sheep in Seville, laboring on the roads at Gibraltar, and going as far as North Africa to work as a builder to earn money to help a noble family that had fallen on hard times.

Finally, around 1538, at forty-three, João settled in the city of Granada in southern Spain and opened a small bookstall selling prayer books and holy pictures. The man who had tasted so much of life’s bitterness seemed to have found a safe harbor.

The people of Granada were astonished and concluded that the bookseller had gone completely mad. They seized him, tied him up and threw him into the Royal Hospital of Granada, where the insane were locked up in those days.

At that time the only “treatment” for the mentally ill was to tie them to stone pillars, starve them and whip their bare flesh mercilessly to “punish the madness”. Locked up with these poor people, bleeding from the whip himself, João came to know the pain of people stripped of their humanity.

From the depths of that prison he prayed:

“Lord, have mercy on these poor people! Grant that one day I may open a hospital where the mentally ill and the poor are cared for with love and respect, not with brutal beatings!”

When Saint John of Avila heard the news, he hurried to the hospital to see him. He saw that this was not madness but a deep conversion, and he gently urged João to master his feelings and give up his strange public penances, and to turn that fire into practical service.

Every day people saw him in an old gray cloak, with a large basket and two clay pots hung around his neck, going through the streets of Granada and calling out words that touched their hearts:

“Brothers, do good to yourselves! For the love of God, do good!”

He gathered every leftover crust and every spare coin to bring home and feed the sick. By day he begged; at night he washed the sick himself, did their laundry, changed their bandages and sat with each one to comfort them.

For his time, what he did was revolutionary. He separated patients by illness to prevent contagion, and gave each one a bed of his own with a warm mattress and blankets, instead of throwing three or four together on a heap of filthy straw as had long been the custom. That house later grew into the official Hospital of San Juan de Dios, opened in 1544, near the very neighborhood where he had collapsed in his conversion years before, and it went on serving the sick without interruption until the twentieth century.

As the flames swallowed the building and thick black smoke sent everyone fleeing, John of God rushed straight into the fire. One by one, he carried paralyzed patients out on his back.

When everyone was out, he went back in to save blankets and beds for the patients. The fire raged so fiercely that the roof fell in. People thought he had burned to death, and then, to their amazement, he walked out of the flames unharmed.

Pope Urban VIII beatified him in 1630, and on October 16, 1690, Pope Alexander VIII canonized John of God. In 1886, Pope Leo XIII proclaimed him patron of the sick and of hospitals. In 1930, Pope Pius XI declared him patron of doctors and nurses. The Church celebrates him on March 8 each year.

In Vietnam, the Brothers of the Hospitaller Order of Saint John of God are a beloved presence through the Thánh Mẫu General Hospital and centers caring for people with disabilities and mental illness in Đồng Nai and many other places.