St. John of God, Gambler and Drunkard

[1495–1550] FEAST DAY: March 8

St. John of God’s biographers have always been suspicious about an incident that occurred when he was eight years old. A man who claimed to be a wandering priest stopped at the home of John’s parents, Andrew and Theresa, in the Portuguese town of Montemor-o-Novo, near the ancient city of Evora. John and his family were poor peasants who owned a few sheep and worked a few acres of land. They were not important; they had no powerful friends. So the next morning when Andrew and Theresa discovered the stranger had vanished, taking their little boy with him, there was no one they could turn to for help.

As there is a longstanding tradition of sanitizing the lives of the saints, readers who look up St. John of God in a standard collection of saints’ lives may encounter this excuse: the priest’s tales of his exciting life on the road fired the wanderlust of little John. The next morning, when John begged the departing houseguest to take him along on his adventures, the priest, being a softhearted fellow, agreed.

If, by some slim chance, this is how John’s disappearance from home actually played out, one can’t help asking why the stranger did not at least run the idea by Andrew and Theresa. And then there is the matter of how the story ends. At a town in Spain called Oropresa, some sixty miles west of Toledo, the priest left John with a family of strangers. He made no effort to get John home, nor did John ever see the man again.

The whole story smells fishy. Most likely John was forcibly abducted, possibly even seduced by the stranger.

As for John’s distraught parents, a few months after his disappearance his mother died—of a broken heart, the neighbors said. With both wife and child gone, John’s father gave up the farm to join a community of Franciscans as a lay brother.

Meanwhile, in Oropresa, John was safe and happy. The Count of Oropresa employed John’s foster father as one of the managers of his estates. Since John had a little experience as a shepherd, he was put to work guarding the count’s flocks. The new family—we do not know their name—accepted John as one of their own, cared for him, loved him. The man John came to regard as his father was devout; he taught John to say twenty-four Hail Marys every day, one for each year of Our Lady’s life after Christ’s Ascension.

As John approached manhood he felt restless. The routines of working the count’s estate bored him; he longed for excitement. When King Charles V declared war on France, John enlisted in the army. As a twenty-two-year-old raw recruit he was eager to prove to seasoned veterans that he was as much a man, as much a soldier as they were. He adopted all the vices of the camp: swearing, gambling, heavy drinking, and visits to prostitutes. A word about swearing in the sixteenth century: all the foul terms we hear today were in use five hundred years ago, but with a difference that made swearing much worse. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance it was common to pair up vulgar obscenities with the names of God, the Virgin Mary, and any saint the swearer thought of at the moment.

John’s army career ended in disgrace. He had been assigned to watch a cache of plundered valuables but left his post. In his absence a portion of the loot was stolen. Some of the officers wanted John hanged for dereliction of duty, but a senior commander intervened, gave John a dishonorable discharge, and sent him home. The shame of being thrown out of the army marked the first step in John’s long process of conversion.

Back in Oropresa, John still longed for excitement, but he also began to toy with the idea of doing something with his life that would be pleasing to God. At one point he went to Ceuta, a city in Morocco recently captured by Spain, with the idea of ransoming Christian slaves from the Moors. There he met a poverty-stricken Portuguese family whom he decided to support. He found a job building the city’s fortifications. Convicts brought over from Spain made up most of the workforce, and the foremen at the building site did not ask who was a free man and who was a criminal: they beat anyone they thought was slacking off. For the convicts there was only way to escape such a brutal, degrading sentence—run away to the Moors and convert to Islam. John had gotten to know one convict who gave up his Catholic faith to win his freedom. The man’s apostasy preyed on John’s mind until he almost believed that he, in some inexplicable way, had contributed to the convict’s decision to deny Christ. He disclosed his qualms of conscience to an elderly Franciscan chaplain, who recognized an excessively scrupulous penitent when he heard one. He assured John the runaway convict was responsible for his own decisions, that for John to blame himself was a perverse form of pride. Concluding that it was spiritually dangerous for a man as sensitive as John to continue working where so many men succumbed to despair, the priest commanded him, for his own good, to go back to Spain at once.

In Spain John drifted from odd job to odd job. At last he settled on selling religious books and holy pictures out of a small shop he opened in Granada. The business enjoyed modest success; his neighbors respected him as an honest, sincerely religious man. But John remained obsessed with his own sinfulness.

In January 1537 St. John of Avila, a renowned mystic and fiery preacher, came to Granada to preach on the feast of St. Sebastian, January 20. The guest preacher’s reputation attracted a large congregation, and John was among the crowd that day. In the middle of the sermon a high-pitched wail echoed through the church. Howling like a wounded animal, calling on God to forgive his sins, John stumbled through the congregation and out the church door. He ran through the city streets beating his breast, tearing his hair, half mad with the thought that he was damned. After several days of this, the town authorities had John locked in an asylum. There John of Avila visited him. Calmly but firmly he told John to give up hysterics. If he wanted to please God, he must find something useful to do.

Once John was released from the asylum he did not have to look very far to find good work that needed doing. Like every other city in Europe, Granada had hospitals, orphanages, and shelters for the poor—but not enough. John rented a house and turned it into a hospital for the poor with forty-six beds. Initially no one came forward to help him. No doubt his hysterical outburst on St. Sebastian’s Day made any would-be volunteers think twice. He did all the work himself: he nursed his patients, did the laundry, cooked the meals, cleaned the wards, even hiked into the hills to collect firewood. To get the food and supplies his hospital needed, John begged in the streets. Carrying a large basket he walked through Granada crying, “Who wants to do good to himself? Do good to yourselves, brothers, for the love of God!”

It took time for the inhabitants of the city to overcome their assumption that John was out of his mind. Slowly, benefactors rallied around, donating the essentials John needed to run his hospital. In time doctors and nurses offered their services, free of charge.

Now John expanded his work, opening a shelter for the homeless, caring for the elderly, finding foster mothers for orphans, and work for the unemployed. The hospital remained his primary work, however, and he had a regular team of assistants who worked in the wards. Church authorities in Granada recognized their efforts by giving the men a religious habit. As for the founder, in recognition of his sanctity, the churchmen urged him to take the name John of God.

Toward the end of his life John wrote a brief letter to a young man outlining what was necessary to be an effective nurse in his hospital. “You will have to work more than you have been used to,” John said, “but you will have the consolation of doing all for God. Be zealous in the service of the poor and be ready to sacrifice even your skin. Have God continually before your eyes and love him above all things.”