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Saint Camillusby Chrissy Grace It’s night. The moon is casting long shadows through the old hospital windows. Suddenly, squeaking, suspicious shoes sneak down the hall. Then screams and a patient’s unending moaning follows. Everyone in the hospital is used to this, so no one moves. After a moment there is something different. The moaning is interrupted by the sound of worn out, brown boots of a six foot man bounding down the hall. Camillus had once lived the hardened life of a soldier, a drinker and a gambler. Now all that is changed. He takes the arm of the nurse who had been beating his patient and shoves the guilty man up against the wall. (Nobody wants to be around when Camillus is angry.) The other attendants gasp as he points a menacing fist at the mean nurse. "You may have badly hurt that patient.... Jesus is in these sick people. If you ever treat a patient with anything other than gentleness, you shall answer for it to me." What’s this? Camillus said that the sick, the old, the dying are Jesus. If God helped Camillus to see this, I’m sure he’ll help me to see this when I’m in the same shoes.
Camillus was born in 1550 at Bocchianico. At 17 he and his father went to fight with the Venetians against the Turks. He had a bad habit of gambling and a violent temper. When he was 25 he changed his life. He began the Ministers of the Sick, a group of men dedicated to serving Jesus in the sick and aged. Camillus himself suffered many illnesses and died in 1614. Home Copyright © 1999-2007, Daughters of St. Paul. All Rights Reserved.
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