Feast day: March 8

St. John of God

Religious Founder · 1495–1550

Patron of Hospitals, nurses, booksellers, the mentally ill

Portuguese soldier and bookseller whose dramatic conversion led him to found a hospital in Granada and an order that still runs hundreds of health facilities worldwide.

John of God was born in Portugal in 1495 and lived a restless, wandering life — as a shepherd, a soldier in Europe's wars, and a labourer in North Africa — before settling at Granada in Spain as a seller of religious books and images. He was already in his forties, with no settled purpose.

A sermon by the famous preacher John of Ávila pierced him so deeply that he fell into an extravagant public repentance, beating himself and crying through the streets, until he was taken for mad and confined to an asylum. There he saw at first hand the cruelty with which the sick and the insane were then treated — and found his vocation.

On his release he rented a house in Granada and began gathering the sick, the poor, the homeless, and the abandoned, begging through the city for their support with the cry, 'Do good to yourselves!' His tireless, tender care made his house the model of a new kind of hospital, and disciples gathered around him.

He died in 1550, worn out at fifty-five, reportedly after rescuing a man from a flooded river. The companions he left behind became the Brothers Hospitallers of St. John of God, who carry on his work worldwide. He was canonized in 1690 and named patron of hospitals, the sick, and nurses.

He was once committed to an asylum himself — and emerged determined to revolutionize how the mentally ill were treated.

“Labor without stopping; do all the good works you can while you still have the time.”
— St. John of God

Image: Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/08472c.htm