For each day of the year a thought, an episode from his life, a prayer: this is what is contained in the book ‘San Camillo de Lellis. 365 giorni con il patrono dei malati’ (‘St. Camillus de Lellis: 365 Days with the Patron Saint of the Sick’) which has just been published by Don Marcello Stanzione with the publishing house Segno.

This volume, written on the occasion of the four hundredth anniversary of the death of St. Camillus well expresses the Camillian charism and the thought of a saint who is unanimously recognised as the precursor of modern health care.

Don Stanzione, who has been devoted to him ever since he was boy and is at the present time the parish priest of the abbey of Santa Maria Nova in the commune of Campagna (Salerno), guides us through the events in the life of this extraordinary witness to Christ. A man extraneous to the theological disputes of the time and yet capable of a personal and intense reading of the Gospel. As Carlo Di Pietro writes in the preface to the book, ‘Camillus made the last first’, the sick and the suffering, those marginalised by society and piled up in the hospitals of the time like abandoned people, To them he dedicated himself in a complete way, thinking of their bodies and their spirits. ‘The message of Camillus’, continues Di Pietro – ‘starts from far way – but can reach our times and our society, which always has to deal with pain and illness’.

In this book, which is introduced by a detailed biography of the saint, are mixed quotations (‘we wish to serve all the sick with that affection that a loving mother usually has towards her sick only child’, 4 January), with anecdotes from his life (for example his habit of having a good spiritual book read to the sick while they were eating, 17 March), and prayers, in particular for suffering people. The Order of the Ministers of the Sick thanks Don Stanzione for his work which is a good way of directing attention every day to the ‘Giant of Charity’ during this Camillian jubilee year.

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