His history can be read as an authentic journey of transfiguration. Perhaps one can also identify its determining stages, that is to say those moments when he emerges transformed again and again and appears to be ‘another’ compared to what he had been previously.

   The first stage was indeed a matter of being struck by lightening. Was not his so-named ‘conversion’ in fact a real ‘illumination’ which transformed him in a radical way? His first biographer narrates that ‘suddenly he was assailed from heaven by a ray of inner light…as though he was knocked down by divine light he fell to the ground’.[1] The words that Cicatelli attributed to him express a total overturning of his way of seeing life, his past and his wishes for the future.

There then followed the long and tormented period of searching for his vocation, that is to say his true identity, the one that God had conceived and planned for him, that is to say his commitment to caring for the ‘sick poor’. When he perceived this project, during that sultry August night on the eve of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary of the year 1582, he was transfigured anew, to the point that he dedicated himself to such care body and soul.

    His human and spiritual physiognomy then progressed and matured during the years of the planting of the new religious Order that he had founded. His interior change became more intense and visible when, after forgoing every institution position of the Institute, he asked to be able to devote himself solely and in the first person to the exercise of the ministry of charity.

  How ‘transfigured’ he now really appeared! Camillus should be contemplated when he was enraptured by ecstasy in front of the Crucifix or by the ecstatic rapture that illumined him when he was totally dedicated to caring for the sick: ‘his eyes were so dazzled by the splendour of those poor people that in their faces he admired nothing else but the very face of his Lord’.

This journey of transfiguration achieved its earthly completion at the hour of his death, which was lovingly described by his biographer: ‘with a happy face and his eyes turned towards heaven, without any horror or other transformation of his face, he went to dwell in heaven’. This was the moment that preceded the fullness of his transfiguration when he was ‘glorified’ because ‘a shining cloud came over him’ (Mt 17:5), the enveloping presence of God, who welcomed him into His house.

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