Today, 2 October, we celebrate the memorial of guardian angels who, as St. Camillus assured his religious, ‘defend the dying, and speak through your mouths, suggesting to you what at that solemn moment you should say to those poor people’.

We want to offer you an episode narrated by Vanti in his book ‘San Camillo de Lellis e i suoi Ministri degli Infermi’ (‘St. Camillus de Lellis and his Ministers of the Sick’) where two of the religious of St. Camillus encountered a special intercession.

‘If he was convinced of this it was not only because of his faith; he and his religious had had repeated and marked confirmation of this. In addition to the authoritative testimony of San Filippo Neri, to the effect that he had seen angels help two Ministers of the Sick at the side of a dying man, he knew that one night in the year 1596 a handsome young man had come to the Magdalene House to look for help for a dying man,. Accompanying the two religious in the street, he went ahead of them with so much agility and speed that they did not manage to keep by his side and have news about the sick man. As soon as they had reached the prisons of Tor di Nona, the young man pointed to an open door and said: ‘this is where the dying man is’. And before they could ask him any further questions they saw him no more. The religious went into the home and going from the first room to the second they found there an old man alone who was dying in the light of a lantern. Fearful of such strange solitude and even more of certain frightening shadows that they saw or they seemed to see, they attended as they should have done to the dying man who did not speak but made signs that he understood. He expired within a quarter of an hour, ‘very glad’ at that unexpected help. The religious, wanting to see to whom they could entrust the dead man went into the adjoining room where an old woman, overcome by tiredness, was asleep on a chair. Awakened, and surprised to see two religious in front of her, whom she had not called and had not had called, the woman said that the dead man was a stranger who was very devoted to his guardian angel, to whom he constantly prayed. She was not able to say anything about the young man who had called the religious there and she could not guess who he was, because nobody had seen the sick man before them. The two religious left convinced that only an angel could have called them and led them to the bed of the old man’.

M.Vanti, San Camillo de Lellis e suoi Ministri degli Infermi, Coletti, Roma, 1964, III Edizione, pp. 218/219.