The Saint Who Lost His Way to Find It: Saint Camillus de Lellis
It is a peculiar fact about saints, a fact that our modern minds find difficult to digest, that they often begin as spectacular sinners. This is not, as the cynics would have it, because virtue is merely vice grown tired, nor is it, as the sentimentalists suggest, because a dramatic fall must precede every great rising. It is rather that the capacity for greatness, like a coin, has two sides that cannot be separated. The man who can plunge into the depths of hell is often the same man who can scale the heights of heaven. For just as it takes a certain kind of madness to run headlong into vice, it takes the same kind of madness to pursue virtue with the relentless passion of the saints.
Camillus de Lellis understood this madness better than most, though he understood it last of all. He was born in 1550, arriving in this world on the very day his mother dreamed of her son being led to the gallows with a cross upon his chest. Like all prophetic dreams, it was both perfectly true and perfectly false. The cross he would wear was not the cross of shame but the red cross of charity, yet it would indeed lead him to a kind of death – not the death of the body, but the more difficult death of the self.
He was born into that curious class of minor nobility that has produced so many saints and sinners, perhaps because it provides just enough privilege to make one dangerous and just enough responsibility to make one restless. His father was a military captain, and young Camillus seemed destined to follow in those martial footsteps, though he would march first toward destruction before finding his true battalion.
The modern world, with its endless talk of self-esteem and positive thinking, would have had nothing to offer young Camillus. For he was that most dangerous of creatures – a tall, strong, intelligent young man with a temper like a thunderstorm and a gambling addiction that would have made the prodigal son blush. He was, in short, exactly the sort of person that our modern therapeutic culture would have tried to "fix" with meditation apps and anger management courses. But Camillus did not need fixing; he needed breaking. And break he did, in the most literal sense, when a mysterious wound appeared on his leg – a wound that would never fully heal.
It is one of those divine ironies, those celestial jokes that God seems so fond of, that this wound which seemed to destroy Camillus's military career would become the very thing that made his true vocation possible. For it was this wound that brought him to the hospital of San Giacomo, where he would first encounter the suffering that would transform his life. But we are getting ahead of our story.
First, we must speak of his gambling, for it is impossible to understand Camillus without understanding how completely he had given himself over to this vice. He did not merely gamble; he became gambling incarnate. He lost his money, his clothes, and at one particularly low moment, even his shirt. It is worth noting that a man who will gamble away his shirt is a man who has not yet learned the difference between courage and foolishness – a lesson that would serve him well when he later had to risk his life caring for plague victims.
The world would say that such a man was worthless, that he had squandered every advantage and deserved whatever misery came his way. The world would say this because the world, despite its pretensions to sophistication, can only think in straight lines. But God prefers to think in circles, or rather in spirals, where every ending becomes a beginning and every fall contains within it the seeds of rising.
And so it was that this gambling soldier, this walking disaster of a man, found himself at the lowest point of his life, having lost everything, sitting under a fig tree like a reversed St. Augustine, when grace found him. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that grace had been pursuing him all along, and he had finally run out of places to hide.
The transformation was not instant, as our age of quick fixes might prefer. It was messy and gradual and involved multiple attempts to join the Franciscans (who, showing admirable wisdom, repeatedly rejected him). It involved that mysterious wound that would not heal, forcing him to confront his own weakness. It involved working in a hospital where he discovered that the suffering of others was somehow more real and more pressing than his own suffering.
Here we come to the great paradox of Camillus's life, which is also the great paradox of Christianity itself: that we find ourselves by losing ourselves, that we become whole by being broken, that we live by dying daily. Camillus, who had spent his youth trying to win everything through gambling, discovered that the only way to win was to lose completely. The man who had been so consumed with his own desires became the man who would founder an order dedicated to serving others.
The modern mind, which likes its stories neat and its morals clear, might want to stop here. But that would be to miss the most important part of the story. For Camillus did not simply switch from being bad to being good, like turning off one light and turning on another. Rather, he transformed his vices into virtues. The same reckless courage that had made him a compulsive gambler made him fearless in serving plague victims. The same stubborn will that had kept him at the gaming table made him relentless in his service to the sick. Even his wound, which never healed and caused him constant pain, became a source of communion with the suffering.
It is worth noting that Camillus founded his order, the Ministers of the Sick (later known as the Camillians), at a time when hospitals were places of horror rather than healing. The sick were often treated as less than human, and medical care was at best rudimentary. Into this situation came Camillus and his followers, wearing the red cross that would later become so universal a symbol of medical care. They brought not just physical care but dignity to the sick, treating each patient as Christ himself – a rather radical notion then as now.
And here we come to the final and most delicious irony of Camillus's life: that this man who had been such a spectacular failure at being a soldier became the founder of what was, in essence, a new kind of army. His followers were organized with military precision, but their weapons were bandages rather than swords, their battles were fought against disease rather than men, and their victories were measured not in territories conquered but in lives saved and souls comforted.
The modern world, if it thinks of saints at all, tends to think of them as either impossibly perfect beings or as psychological cases to be explained away. But Camillus stands as a rebuke to both these views. He was neither perfect nor explainable; he was something far more interesting – he was real. His holiness did not consist in never having sinned but in having allowed his sins to be transformed into the raw material of sanctity.
In the end, Camillus died as he had lived his later life, thinking more of others than himself. His last words were instructions about how to properly care for the sick. The wound that had pursued him throughout his life had finally brought him home, and the cross that his mother had seen in her dream had become not a symbol of shame but a badge of honor worn by thousands of medical workers across the centuries.
His story stands as a reminder that God writes straight with crooked lines, that no one is too far gone for grace, and that our wounds, both physical and spiritual, may be the very means of our healing. In an age obsessed with success, Camillus shows us the power of sanctified failure. In a time that seeks to eliminate suffering at all costs, he demonstrates that our wounds may be our greatest gifts. And in a world that increasingly views human beings as problems to be solved rather than mysteries to be revered, he stands as a testament to the transforming power of seeing Christ in every suffering face.
For in the end, what makes a saint is not the absence of sin but the presence of transformation. Camillus de Lellis, the gambling soldier who became the servant of the sick, understood this better than most. His life reminds us that the journey to holiness is not a straight march but a series of stumbles forward, and that sometimes the longest way round is the shortest way home.
-The Seeker's Quill
