di p. Emidio Spogli

Tratto da “Temi di pastorale sanitaria. Conversazioni svolte a medici e infermieri, cappellani ospedalieri, religiose infermiere”

What happened that early morning of 2 February 1575 on the path that led from S. Giovanni Rotondo to Manfredonia was an event that involved – and radically involved – Camillus de Lellis. It is an event that necessarily also involves the lives and the work of the Ministers of the Sick of our epoch.

The overwhelming experience that overwhelmed our Founder must be renewed in all those whom God has called to share in the mission of charity. The new path on which the Spirit has pushed them can only begin with the same experience with which God outlined the new pathway to which He directed their Founder.

For this reason, we will try to explore some directions that emerge from the event of the conversion of our Father and Teacher which impose themselves on our thoughts.

Camillus had gone up to the religious house of the Capuchin friars to perform a humble errand entrusted to him by the friars of Manfradonia: the donkey was carrying a ‘load of pasta to be changed into a great deal of wine’. Camillus, on the other hand, carried with him the burden of his twenty-five years of life, during which he had repeatedly rejected in a frivolous way the appeals of God, and they had been many in number: the death of his father Don Giovanni who had made him a mercenary; a wound at the top of his foot which began to trouble him and humbled him; a rather sudden vow to take off his soldier’s uniform which he had just put on and to put on the habit of the Franciscans; his meeting with his uncle who was a Capuchin; his unsuccessful experience working at St. James’ Hospital in Rome; the shame of begging to which he had been reduced by his vice of gambling; and the hard work of being a house servant to which the pendants of his ragged military uniform could not give lustre.

He had accepted that job as something different. However, now he was in another religious house that was not very dissimilar from that of Manfredonia and he did not have any prospects: closed to all the appeals of God he could not imagine that during the next fourteen hours of his life everything would change. With great respect and humility, we will try to follow the steps that would lead Camillus onto the way of the Lord.

Now he was in that oasis of peace of the friary and after carrying out his errand he looked down from Gargano onto the distant panorama of the town of Manfredonia to which he planned to return at first light.

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