Saint are by definition ‘extreme’, for they see past the veil of this world, and act as though all that mattered were the next life – imagine, indeed. Hence, one of the things looked for in a person who dies with a reputation for sanctity is ‘heroic virtue’, that goes far above and beyond the call of duty, so to speak, and the more above and beyond, the better, all things considered.

One of those who practised such ‘extreme’ charity is Saint John of God (+1550), sort of an early Mother Teresa, who devoted the last decade of his short life – he died at 55 – helping the poorest of the poor and the sickest of the sick, in an era when many of these were left to wallow in their own misery, dying in the gutter, or wasting away wherever they could find a bed. It was not unlike like Calcutta when the first Sister of Charity arrived.

Before this last decade which launched him into holiness and then heaven, John had led a turbulent, dissolute life, running away or being kidnaped away from home at the age of 8, and left to fend for himself; he begged on the streets, and was eventually taken in by a man, to tend for his sheep and – implausibly enough – marry his daughter.

John would have none of it, and ran off again to becomes a soldier-at-arms, a trooper and mercenary, a rough life he lived for 18 years.

But his faith had not left him, nor his latent love of family; he tried to find his parents, but his mother had died soon after he had disappeared from home; and his father, who had joined the Franciscans (!), was also gone. So John went off to Africa with the vague intent to free Christian slaves and perhaps gain martyrdom; that did not work out so well, and a Franciscan urged him to return to Spain.

It was soon after this that, at the age of 42 – back then, well into middle age – on the feast of Saint Sebastian, January 20th, 1537, during a sermon by the great priest and preacher Saint John of Avila, he had a profound conversion and what may have been a sort of breakdown. The itinerant former soldier wandered out into the streets beating and berating himself, loudly proclaiming sorrow for all his past sins, for all who wanted to hear. And many did not. He was soon put into an asylum, where the ‘treatment’ consisted of being chained, flogged and starved. Not that John minded that much, for in his mind he deserved far worse, but the same John of Avila intervened, and urged the would-be saint to moderate his penance, and begin to work with the sick, the poor, the abandoned.

To this he dedicated himself with the zeal characteristic of his intense nature, and, like Mother Teresa five centuries later, others soon joined this radical man in his radical work. He founded an Order of Hospitallers, before his death on this day, his 55th birthday, in 1550. The Brother Hospitallers of Saint John of God – officially approved in 1572 – now number 45,000 members, working throughout the world in 53 countries for those most abandoned.

Would that we could get back once again to doing ‘medicine’ for the love of God, instead of the love of mammon, for which so many seem to work in our own over-compensated socialist health-care system, where everyone seems to be raking in six-figure union wages. And now, instead of caring for so many of the sick, we offer them an ‘easy’ death. The whole system – as much good as is still done – is unsustainable without the love of God that John of God lived out to the full.

We too should all do what we can for those less fortunate. God can do miracles with – and for – those who take His truth to heart, regardless of how late we get to the game. Just so long as we die trying.

Saint John of God, ora pro nobis!

 

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