(Short Version)
July 14: Saint Camillus de Lellis, Priest—Optional Memorial
(In the United States this memorial is transferred to July 18)
1550–1614
Patron Saint of the sick, hospitals, hospital workers, nurses, and nursing associations
Invoked against the vice of gambling
Canonized by Pope Benedict XIV on June 29, 1746
Before Camillus’ birth in the Kingdom of Naples, his mother had a dream that she would have a son who would wear a red cross on his chest and lead others with the same cross. She died when Camillus was young, leaving him mostly on his own. As a teenager, Camillus joined his father on military campaigns where he fell into the vice of gambling and constantly experienced destitution. On one campaign, he suffered a leg wound that never properly healed.
In Camillus’ mid-twenties, he did menial work in a Franciscan friary after his military regiment was disbanded. One day, a saintly friar told him, “God is everything. The rest is nothing. One should save one’s soul which does not die.” Soon after, Camillus fell to his knees and prayed, “Lord, I have sinned. Forgive this great sinner! How unhappy I have been for so many years not to have known you and not to have loved you. Lord, give me time to weep for my sins for a long time.” After his conversion, his application for admission to the friars was rejected due to his unhealed leg wound.
Camillus found work in Rome at Saint James Hospital for the Incurable. There, he received treatment while caring for the sick and dying and living a life of prayer and penance. At that time, many hospital workers were society’s rejects. Many did it to make a meager living, not as an act of mercy. Camillus’s newfound faith and penitential life made him stand out, and he was made the hospital’s director. As director, his efforts to form a lay association of charitable hospital workers proved fruitless. When Saint Philip Neri became Camillus’ spiritual director, he encouraged Camillus and suggested that he become a priest to complete his calling. With Saint Philip’s help, Camillus found a benefactor, completed his theological studies, and was ordained a priest at age thirty-four.
Father Camillus and his hospital workers served the sick at Rome’s Holy Spirit Hospital out of charity, according to their vocation. In addition to working at the hospital, they ministered to the homebound, the sick, and the dying. In 1586, Pope Sixtus V formally approved Camillus’ new congregation, the Order of Clerks Regular, Ministers of the Infirm (M.I.), later known as the Camillians. In addition to the traditional vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, they took a fourth vow of “service to the sick poor, including the plague-ridden, in their corporeal and spiritual needs, even at risk to their own life, having to do this out of sincere love for God.” In 1591, Pope Gregory XV raised the congregation to a religious order. They wore black habits with a large red cross.
In the following years, Father Camillus and his orde
