Forty years ago, on 27 March 1974, St. Camillus de Lellis was proclaimed by Pope Paul VI the special patron saint of military health care. For this anniversary, the Military Ordinary Archbishop for Italy, Monsignor Santo Marcianò –  who on Thursday 27 March at 11.00 will preside over a celebration of the Eucharist at the Celio Military Clinic of Rome – has sent the following message:

St. Camillus: a ‘Service’ that Converts

Amongst the saints that military history places before us as models and guides for the journey of human and Christian maturation, this year we remember with especial intensity St. Camillus who died four hundred years ago and who, forty years ago, on 27 March 1974, was proclaimed the patron saint of military health care.

His message is one of conversion: from military service to service to the sick; from a worldly life to an existence spent for those who, bent in body or the spirit, became for him the image of Christ, who said: ‘I was sick and you visited me’ (cf. Mt 25:36).

One can see in the history of St. Camillus that it was suffering that led to the explosion of his conversion and, as a consequence, to his vocation – this was suffering that he experienced in the first person, being afflicted by an incurable wound which led him to experience the harshness of hospitals; a suffering which, specifically amidst this harshness, opened his eyes and ripped open his heart to the pain of other people. He thus understood that human pain needed not only ‘treatment’ but also ‘care’, nearness, dedication…the giving of one’s life. And to give his life according to the road that the Lord pointed out to him, he was ready to leave his life to place himself at the service of the lives of suffering people.

Yes: ‘to service’!  In this service is concealed the secret of the conversion, the maturation, the full humanity and the practical and great holiness of Camillus de Lellis. And in this service is concealed the secret and the pathway that military health-care workers are called to follow.

Like us, St. Camillus was used to military ‘service’: this phrase is a fine one and it is one which in essential terms makes us think how this service, perhaps, educated him, matured him and prepared him to welcome this conversion that the Lord, through suffering, made explode within him!

Dear friends, I am increasingly convinced how much opportunity and capacity for real ‘service’ – to the poor, the last and the suffering – is contained in the lives of our military men and women. And I think that in it, the world of health care itself can bear witness and point to further service, a maturation in service, a fullness of service. And thus a conversion!

The ‘service’ of you health-care workers – as you well know – becomes full, real and even sanctifying not when you halt to come to the aid of those with illness or to provide treatment but when you place yourselves in contact with those who suffer, rending your hearts in front of a reality that is as simple as it is extraordinary: the awareness that in front of you there is a human being who, in his or her frailty and his or her greatness, asks for care, nearness, dedication and the giving of your lives. You have the privilege and the responsibility to go down this pathway and in a certain sense to teach it to all of us, who, like St. Camillus, sooner or later come into contact with suffering, personally or through military service itself.

This is a pathway of humanisation, it is a pathway of evangelisation!

The secret of the conversion of St. Camillus is simply that charity which sees in every human creature the face of a person, the very Face of Christ, which should be defended and promoted, loved and served. It is to this ‘conversion’ that military ‘service’ can and must prepare, call and push us, as well, so that our world, and the whole of the world that we come into contact with, is always illumined by that ‘service to life’ which opens up pathways of peace, of joy and of holiness.

May St. Camillus show us the pathway of this service and ensure that we all follow it!

I bless you

Santo Marcianò

Military Ordinary Archbishop for Italy

Look here  at the photographic gallery of the journey of the relic of the heart of St. Camillus to Cosenza and its encounter with the Bersaglieri of the first regiment.
Look here at the press information.