I SHALL SERVE YOU – The life of st.Camillus de Lellis

Italy, 16th century. A mercenary soldier, a gambler, a beggar, this was Camillus de Lellis before his conversion, thanks to the encounter with a Capuchin friar in San Giovanni Rotondo. A wound on his leg forced him to be admitted at St. James Hospital in Rome, the hospital of the Incurables, where he witnessed the inhuman conditions in which the sick were abandoned. After he recovered, he stayed on as an attendant in the hospital and his vocation slowly became a true charism of dedication to the sick, to love and serve them “like a mother loves her only sick child”. His impetus of christian love touched other people, “good and pius men”, with whom he later founded the Order of the Ministers of the Sick, known today as Camillians. The way of taking care of the sick underwent an epochal change with him. The nursing rules estabilished by Camillus are still in use today. In the first centuries after their foundation, 250 Camillians gave their life for the sick, especially those hit by the plague, curing them in places where nobody dared enter. The drama on St.Camillus is enriched with interviews, one to Fr. Franco Azzalli OSM, who inserts Camillus in the extraordinary flourishing of Saints in the 16th century, and one to Fr. Frank Monks, past Superior General of the Camillians. This one was recorded in the Cubiculum, in the Church of the Maddalena in Rome, the place where Camillus passed away on 14th July 1614, and where the relic of his Heart is kept today.