Confessor Camillus

Camillus de Lellis was born in 1550 at Bucchianico in the Abruzzo, then part of the Kingdom of Naples. He was the son of Giovanni de Lellis, a professional soldier, and Camilla Compelli de Laureto, who died during his childhood. Left without firm upbringing, he followed his father into military service and took part in the wars of the Italian peninsula and the Adriatic in the later sixteenth century. A persistent ulcerous wound in his leg, contracted in these years, never healed and caused him pain for the rest of his life. He also fell into compulsive gambling, which repeatedly stripped him of money, weapons, and even clothing.

In 1575, after a particularly ruinous bout of gambling, he was employed as a laborer by the Capuchins at Manfredonia. There he underwent a religious conversion and sought admission to the Capuchin order, but he was dismissed because of his incurable leg condition. He returned to Rome and to the Hospital of San Giacomo degli Incurabili, where he had earlier been a patient, and eventually obtained a position of authority in the house. Appalled by the inadequate and often callous treatment of the sick poor, he formed, in the early 1580s, a company of men committed to nursing the ill from religious motives. Saint Philip Neri encouraged him to prepare for the priesthood; he was ordained in 1584 by Thomas Goldwell, the last surviving Marian bishop of St Asaph.

The community he founded became the Order of Clerks Regular, Ministers of the Infirm, known as the Camillians, whose members wore a red cross on their cassocks as a sign of their vocation. The congregation received papal approval from Sixtus V in 1586 and was constituted a religious order with solemn vows by Gregory XIV in 1591. In addition to poverty, chastity, and obedience, the Camillians bound themselves to the care of the sick, including those struck by plague, even at the risk of their own lives. Camillus established houses in various Italian cities, organized nursing on battlefields and in galleys, and continued to serve in the hospitals of Rome despite his own growing list of ailments, which included the old leg wound, ruptures, and other infirmities.

He laid down the generalate of the order in 1607 but did not abandon the service of the sick. He died in Rome on 14 July 1614 and was buried in the church of Santa Maria Maddalena, the mother church of the Camillians. Pope Benedict XIV beatified him in 1742 and canonized him in 1746. Later popes named him a principal patron of the sick, of hospitals, and of nurses. His feast is kept on 14 July, the day of his death; in the older Roman calendar it was observed on 18 July.