Feast Day July 14, July 18
Founder of the Ministers of the Sick (1550-1614)

“To Christ, God and Man, sick in the person of the Poor – homage of love.”

The mother of St. Camillus was sixty at the time of his birth.  Since his conception was nothing short of a miracle, she felt it was fit that his delivery should be similarly blessed.  Thus, when she went into labor during Mass, she hurried to a stable so her son, like his Savior, could be born on a bed of straw.  Such a child, she believed, was destined to be a saint.  With such an auspicious beginning, it is sometimes ironic to encounter the future saint some twenty years hence, a towering man (six-foot-six), a soldier of fortune, with an irascible temper, a penchant for brawling, and a serious addiction to gambling.  Camillus seems to have inherited these qualities from his father, an old soldier, considerably less pious than his wife.  Together, father and son went off to fight the Turks with the Venetian army.  In the course of these adventures, Camillus developed a hideous and painful sore on his leg, which would afflict him for the rest of his life.  He was sent to the hospital of San Giocamo in Rome, where he worked as a servant while also undergoing treatment.  His nursing talents were appreciated, but his temper was so intolerable that he was dismissed to return to the army. 

Soon his physical suffering was compounded by the consequences of his own temperament.  His gambling resulted in his losing everything, including the proverbial shirt off his back.  In desperation, he took a job as a builder for a Capuchin community.  There his exposure to the friars awakened a dormant thirst for a God and he vowed to amend his life.  He sought to enter a religious community, but his ailment proved an impediment.  (Sound health was required for entrants to religious orders.)  Instead, he returned to San Giacamo and devoted himself, in a spirit of religious discipline, to the care of the sick and the dying. 

Charity was not a virtue commonly associated with the hospitals at the time, and healing was virtually rare.  Conditions in San Giacamo, as in most other hospitals, were appalling.  Aside from the filth, the care provided by indifferent and even sadistic staff members – often recruited from the criminal class – was often more insidious than any illness.  In this environment, Camillus was determined to infuse an atmosphere of love.  In the spirit of his newfound faith he sought to treat each sick and dying person as another Christ, a living sacrament.  Before long his loving ministrations, combined with his appreciation for the value of good nutrition, cleanliness, and fresh air, produced results that appeared miraculous.  The administrators of the hospital elevated him to the position of superintendent.  

By that time, however, Camillus had conceived the idea of an association of similarly minded nurses, for whom care of the sick and dying would be a religious discipline.  His confessor, * St. Philip Neri, encouraged him to proceed with this project.  He also suggested that Camillus might be able to add the comforts of the sacraments to his nursing care should he become a priest. Camillus therefore dutifully applied himself to the study of Latin and theology and received holy orders in 1584. 

Soon after this, he left San Giacamo with two other companions to establish a model hospital in Rome.  In 1591 Pope Gregory XIV recognized Camillus and his Ministers of the Sick, allowing them to wear a religious habit adorned with a large red cross.  The community grew and its members proved their mettle by volunteering for service amid outbreaks of plague.  Camillus was not content to wait for the sick to come to him.  He used to scour the caves and catacombs of the city to seek out any who suffered.  Given the conditions under which they worked, it is no surprise that many of the ministers became sick and died. 

Camillus personally founded fifteen houses of his order and eight hospitals.  He himself remained in more or less unbearable pain, though, to the end, he insisted on providing personal care at the bedside of the most miserable cases.  He eventually died in Genoa on July 14, 1614, at the age of sixty-four.  He was canonized in 1746.  Having known what it meant both to suffer and to provide succor, he was later declared the patron both of the sick and of nurses. 

See:  C.C. Martindale, Life of Saint Camillus (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1946).

Feast Day October 4
Founder of the Friars Minor (1182 - 1226)

“We have no right to glory in ourselves because of any extraordinary gifts, since these do not belong to us but to God.  But we may glory in crosses, afflictions and tribulations, because these are our own.”

St. Francis was born in the Umbrian city of Assisi in about the year 1182.  His parents were Pietro di Bernardone, a wealthy cloth merchant, and Pica, his French-born wife.  Francis was one of the privileged young men of Assisi, attracted to adventure and frivolity as well as tales of romance.  When he was about twenty, he donned a knight’s armor and went off, filled with dreams of glory, to join a war with the neighboring city-state of Perugia.  He was captured and spent a year in prison before being ransomed.  Upon his return he succumbed to a serious illness from which his recovery was slow.  These experiences provoked a spiritual crisis which was ultimately resolved in a series of dramatic episodes. 

Francis had always been a fastidious person with an abhorrence for paupers and the sick.  As he was riding in the country side one day, he saw a loathsome leper.  Dismounting, he shared his cloak with the leper and then, moved by some divine impulse, kissed the poor man’s ravaged face.  From that encounter, Francis’s life began to take shape around an utterly new agenda, contrary to the values of his family and the world.

While praying before a crucifix before the dilapidated chapel of San Damiano, Francis heard a spoke speak to him: “ Francis, repair my church, which has fallen into disrepair, as you can see.”  At first inclined to take this assignment literally, he set about physically restoring the ruined building.  Only later did he understand his mission in a wider, more spiritual sense.  His vocation was to recall the church to the radical simplicity of the gospel, to the spirit of poverty and to the image of Christ in his poor.

To pay for his program of church repair, Francis took to divesting his father’s warehouse.  Pietro di Bernardone, understandably enraged, had his son arrested and brought to trial before the bishop in the public marketplace.  Francis admitted his fault and restored his father’s money.  Then, in an extraordinary gesture, he stripped off his rich garments and handed them also to his sorrowing father, saying, “Hitherto I have called you father on Earth; but now I say, ‘Our Father, who art in heaven.’” The bishop hastily covered him in a peasant’s frock, which Francis marked with a cross.  

With this his transformation was complete. 

The spectacle which Francis presented – the rich boy who now camped out in the open air, serving the sick, working with his hands, and bearing witness to the gospel – attracted ridicule from the respectable citizens of Assisi.  Gradually it held a subversive appeal.  Before long a dozen other young men had joined him.  They became the nucleus of his new order, the Friars Minor.  The beautiful *Clare of Assisi was soon to following brothers.  Francis personally cut off her hair, marking her for the life of poverty and her consecration to Christ.

The little community continued to grow.  In 1210 they made a pilgrimage to Rome and won the approval of Pope Innocent IIII.  Some of the pope’s advisors warned that Francis’s simple rule, with its emphasis on material poverty, was impractical.  The worldly pope, however, was apparently moved by the sight of the humble friar and perceived in this movement a bulwark against more radical forces.

Francis left relatively few writings, but his life – literally the embodiment of his message – gave rise to numerous legends and parables.  Many of them reflect the joy and freedom that became hallmarks of his spirituality, along with his constant tendency to turn values of the world on their heads.  He esteemed Sister Poverty as his wife, “the fairest bride in the whole world.”  He encouraged his brothers to welcome ridicule and persecution as a means of conforming to the folly of the cross.  He taught that unmerited suffering borne patiently for love of Christ was the path to “perfect joy.”

Behind such holy “foolishness”, Francis could not disguise the serious challenge he posed to the church and the society of his time.  Centuries before the expression became current in the church, Francis represented a “preferential option for the poor.”  Even in his life the Franciscans themselves were divided about how literally to accept his call to radical material poverty.  In an age of crusades and other expressions of “sacred violence”, Francis also espoused a radical commitment to nonviolence.  He rejected all violence as an offense against the gospel commandment of love and a desecration of God’s image in all human beings.

Francis had a vivid sense of sacramentality of creation.  All  things, whether living or inanimate, reflected their Creator’s love and were thus due reverence and wonder.  In this spirit, he composed his famous “Canticle of Creation,” singing the praises of Brother Sun, Sister Moon, and even Sister Death.  Altogether his life and his relationship with the world – including animals, the elements, the poor and sick, as well as princes and prelates, women as well as men – represented the breakthrough of a new model of human and cosmic community. 

Ultimately, Francis attempted no more than to live out the teachings of Christ and the spirit of the gospel.  His identification with Christ was so intense that in 1224 while praying in his hermitage, he received the “stigmata”, the physical marks of Christ’s passion, on his hands and feet.  His last years were marked at once by excruciating physical suffering and spiritual happiness.  “Welcome Sister Death!” he exclaimed at last.  At his request, he was laid on the bare ground in his old habit.  To the friars gathered around him, he gave each his blessing in turn: “I have done my part,” he said, “May Christ teach you to do yours.”  He died on October 3, 1226.  His feast is observed on October 4. 

See: Regis J. Armstrong, ed., St. Francis of Assisi: Writings for a Gospel Life (New York: Crossroad, 1994); The Little Flowers of St. Francis, trans. Raphael Brown (Garden City, N.Y.: Image, 1958).