Confessor John of God

Saint John of God was born João Duarte Cidade in 1495 at Montemor-o-Novo in Portugal. Traditional accounts of his childhood state that at about the age of eight he left home, either by running away or after being taken by a cleric, and was brought into Spain. He grew up in Oropesa in New Castile in the household of a local notable, spending his youth as a shepherd. In his twenties he enlisted as a soldier in the service of the Emperor Charles V. He took part in military campaigns against France and later served in operations against the Ottoman Turks. After leaving the army he attached himself for a time to a Portuguese family that had gone to Ceuta in North Africa; when that household fell into poverty he labored to support them, then returned to the Iberian Peninsula. He next became a seller of printed religious books and holy pictures, working first at Gibraltar and afterward at Granada.

In Granada, toward the end of the 1530s, he underwent a sudden conversion after hearing a sermon by the priest John of Avila. Seized with remorse for his earlier life, he distributed his remaining goods, ran through the streets calling for penance, and was confined as a madman in the royal hospital. The brutal treatment then customarily given to the insane, together with later counsel from John of Avila, shaped his subsequent vocation. Upon his release he determined to spend the rest of his life serving the poor and the sick. He begged from door to door, rented rooms in which to shelter the homeless and the ill, and himself washed, fed, and nursed patients of every condition, including those suffering from contagious disease and those rejected by other institutions.

Companions gradually joined him in this work of hospitality. The informal community that formed around his hospital in Granada became the seed of the Brothers Hospitallers of Saint John of God, a congregation that received papal approval only after his death. He was known for personal austerity, for the conviction that Christ was to be served in the person of the poor, and for physical courage. One widely reported episode describes him entering a burning hospital repeatedly in order to carry patients to safety, an incident that later contributed to his patronage of firefighters. Weakened by labor and by illness, he died in Granada on 8 March 1550, the calendar anniversary of his birth.

John of God was beatified by Pope Urban VIII in 1630 and canonized by Pope Alexander VIII in 1690. His feast day is 8 March. He is venerated as patron of hospitals, nurses, the sick, firefighters, booksellers, printers, heart patients, the dying, alcoholics, and people suffering from mental illness. His remains are preserved in the Basilica of San Juan de Dios in Granada.