St. Camillus de Lellis, Cardsharp and Con Man

[1550–1614] FEAST DAY: July 14

Camilla and Giovanni de Lellis had many children, but only one child, a boy they named Camillus, survived infancy. He should have been the joy of the family, but young Camillus gave his mother nothing but trouble. He got into fights with the other boys in the neighborhood. He skipped school. He learned his prayers, but wouldn’t say them. As a little boy Camillus defied his mother; when he was older he intimidated her. By the time he was twelve years old, Camillus was so tall, so strong, and so quick to unleash his violent temper that Camilla was actually afraid of her own son.

The distraught woman received no help from her husband. In the first place, Giovanni was rarely home. He was a mercenary soldier by profession, and the wars that flared up across Europe in the sixteenth century kept him fully employed. Some mercenaries at this time fought for a cause; Giovanni de Lellis fought for the money. In 1527 Emperor Charles V was offering the highest price to mercenaries who fought for him in his war against Pope Clement VII. Although an Italian and a Catholic, Giovanni signed on with the emperor and participated in that orgy of murder, rape, and sacrilege known as the Sack of Rome.

Camillus was twelve or thirteen when his mother died. Giovanni couldn’t care for him, so he passed into the custody of relatives. They had no more success taming Camillus’s unruly disposition than his mother had. At age seventeen Camillus left his relatives’ house to join his father as a mercenary for the Venetians in their war against the Turks. Standing over six feet tall and powerfully built, Camillus was a recruiting officer’s dream.

The typical vices of a military camp—swearing, drinking, whoring—Camillus picked up quickly. From his father, however, the young man learned how to gamble and the art of the con. Moving from camp to camp, from war to war, and working as a team, father and son supplemented their pay as mercenaries by fleecing their fellow soldiers.

The de Lellis men were between wars when, unexpectedly, Giovanni fell seriously ill. Once the realization came to him that he would not recover, that he was dying, Giovanni sent his son to fetch a priest. After the old mercenary made a good confession, repenting of all his sins and crimes, he received Holy Communion for the last time and died.

Camillus was stunned. He had heard of deathbed conversions. In the camps and on the battlefields he may have even seen one or two. But the idea that his own father would repent, call for a priest, and die in a state of grace probably never occurred to Camillus as even a remote possibility.

Nonetheless, his father’s conversion made an impression on Camillus. He decided he would convert, too. One of his uncles was a Franciscan in Aquila; Camillus resolved to go there, give up his life of sin, and spend the rest of his days as a pious, humble brother of St. Francis.

If Camillus’s uncle thought his hulking nephew’s sudden desire to enter the religious life was funny, he kept it to himself. The other friars in the house were kind to Camillus and let him stay for a while, but suggested that he wasn’t mature enough in his judgment to commit himself to a religious order.

The friars were right. No sooner had Camillus left them than he started gambling again. About this time he suffered a minor injury just above one ankle, which ulcerated and would not heal. Since the wound meant Camillus could not go back to soldiering, he supported himself as a gambler.

He kept on the move, and his ulcerated leg kept getting worse. In Rome he dragged himself to the Hospital of San Giacomo, where he made the brothers who ran the place an offer: if they tended his leg and gave him a bed and meals, he would work as a servant in the wards. Such an arrangement was commonplace in sixteenth-century hospitals. Moved by a combination of charity and practicality, the religious orders who operated the hospitals routinely took in vagrants to do the dirty jobs and heavy lifting so the brothers or nuns could devote themselves to tending their patients.

The dishwashers and floor scrubbers were as tough as Camillus: in such company it was easy to get a card game going. But once those dishwashers and floor scrubbers noticed that Camillus was winning a few too many hands, they accused him of cheating. The resentment among Camillus’s victims bubbled over into bickering and then brawling, until at last the hospital administrators threw Camillus out.

With no other options, he became a mercenary again. Over the next two years Camillus fought in Croatia, Naples, Sicily, and North Africa. When the wars were over he tried his hand again as a professional gambler, but luck deserted him. He lost all his money, then his sword, his pistol, even his coat. When he wandered into the town of Manfredonia he was a penniless drifter who owned nothing but the clothes on his back. And he was only twenty-four years old.

Camillus was begging at a church door in Manfredonia when a wealthy gentleman, famous locally for his good works, spotted the tall, well-built young man and made him an offer. He was the patron of a new monastery that was being built outside town. The builders needed a man to do odd jobs—would Camillus be interested? With no other options presenting themselves, Camillus accepted the offer.

At the construction site Camillus did all the most tedious jobs: he loaded building stones on donkeys, ran errands, brought meals to the craftsmen. He hated the work, but he stayed, and in time he began to acquire two virtues he had never tried to cultivate before: self-discipline and responsibility. When the monastery was finished Camillus set out again for Rome, heading straight for San Giacomo’s hospital. Touched by Camillus’s promises of good behavior, the brothers gave him a second chance.

It was while he was working at San Giacomo that Camillus had an opportunity to introduce himself to St. Philip Neri. The most famous priest in Rome, Neri was spearheading a reawakening of religious life in the city. After listening to the onetime mercenary and compulsive gambler’s story, Neri agreed to serve as Camillus’s personal spiritual director.

The routine of work at the hospital coupled with the spiritual direction from Philip Neri steadied Camillus. Unlike his halfhearted efforts in the past, Camillus felt that this time his conversion was sincere and permanent, and he began to look around for some way to be useful to God and man that was a bit more ambitious than cleaning the San Giacomo kitchen. Hospital work seemed the natural choice. The poor neighborhoods of Rome were crammed with sick folk who had no one to care for them and no place to go for help. And his experiences at San Giacomo gave him definite ideas of what a hospital should and should not be. He rented a house near the Tiber River in a miserable part of the city and fitted it out as a hospital for the poor.

Camillus was euphoric about his new project, but Neri was skeptical. He reminded Camillus that he had barely succeeded in banishing his evil companions and sinful habits, that the neighborhood he had chosen was filled with exactly the types of temptations to which he had always been most susceptible. The smartest thing Camillus could do was cancel the lease on the house, go back to work at San Giacomo, and wait until his religious formation was stronger.

Camillus rejected Neri’s advice. In return Neri said that if Camillus would not listen to sound spiritual counsel, he could no longer act as Camillus’s spiritual director. He even went so far as to refuse to hear Camillus’s confessions in future. It broke their friendship, and marked one of the rare occasions when St. Philip Neri’s assessment of a man’s character was dead wrong. Camillus did not slip back into his old sins; his hospital proved to be a great success. Both priests and laymen volunteered to work with him. As for the hospital itself, Camillus introduced a program of innovations that set the standard for health care in Rome. The wards were well ventilated, the patients were served healthy meals, and those suffering from contagious diseases were quarantined. And Camillus went a step further. Unlike the other hospitals of his day, which sought to give the desperately ill a clean, comfortable place to die, Camillus and his staff tried to cure their patients.

The last thirty years of his life Camillus spent nursing the sick and opening new hospitals, yet as he lay dying, he was anxious that his old sins might outweigh his good works. Shortly before Camillus died the superior of the Carmelite friars visited him. “Pray for me,” Camillus begged the man, “for I have been a great sinner, a gambler, and a man of bad life.”

In his final hour, Camillus’s confidence in God’s mercy was restored. He stretched his arms out so his body took the form of a cross, and giving thanks for the Blood of Christ that had washed away his sins, he died.

St. Camillus de Lellis lies buried in the little Church of Santa Maria Maddalena in Rome. In 1886 Pope Leo XIII named him patron saint of nurses.