Saint Camillus de Lellis

Priest

Feast Day

July 18

Life

1550–1614

Canonized

1746

Order

Order of the Ministers of the Sick (Camillians, M.I.)

Born

Bucchianico, Kingdom of Naples

Saint Camillus de Lellis was born at Bucchianico in the Abruzzi (Kingdom of Naples) on May 25, 1550. Six feet six inches tall and physically imposing, he served as a soldier of fortune in the Venetian and Spanish armies in the wars against the Turks. A leg wound contracted in the campaign at La Goulette in 1574 became a chronic ulcer that troubled him the rest of his life. Reduced to gambling, in 1574 he lost his last shirt at a tavern in Naples and went to work as a manual laborer at a Capuchin friary at Manfredonia, where on the road from Naples to San Giovanni Rotondo, on February 2, 1575, he experienced his conversion.

Twice the Capuchins admitted him to the novitiate; both times the leg ulcer forced his dismissal as physically unfit. Settled at the Hospital of San Giacomo for incurables in Rome, of which he eventually became director, he was scandalized by the negligence and brutality of the paid attendants. With the encouragement of his confessor Saint Philip Neri, in 1582 he founded a confraternity of devout men who would serve the sick out of love. Ordained priest by Bishop Thomas Goldwell on May 26, 1584, he formed the confraternity into a religious congregation, the Ministers of the Sick, approved by Pope Sixtus V in 1586 and raised to the dignity of an order with solemn vows by Pope Gregory XIV in 1591.

The Camillians took a fourth vow, to serve the sick even at the peril of their own lives, including in plague and in war. Camillus introduced numerous reforms in nursing care: separation of contagious patients, fresh air and cleanliness, dietary attention, and spiritual ministry to the dying. The red cross worn on the Camillian habit, granted by Pope Sixtus V, is the historical ancestor of the modern Red Cross humanitarian symbol.

Camillus resigned as superior general in 1607 to devote himself entirely to the service of the sick. Worn out by his own infirmities, he died at the Camillian house in Rome on July 14, 1614. Pope Benedict XIV canonized him on June 29, 1746; Pope Leo XIII, with Saint John of God, declared him patron of the sick and of hospitals (1886) and Pope Pius XI added him as patron of nurses and nursing associations (1930). The General Roman Calendar observes his Memorial on July 18.